Fried cheese sandwiches

The ingredients for these three sandwiches were:

80g Gruyere, grated
2 egg yolks, beaten
1tsp mustard
Few splashes Worcester sauce
Cayenne and/or black pepper, if you like

Packeted, sliced bread works particularly well, I am afraid. Cut off the crusts. Mash the ingredients, and spread them on half of the slices, in the centre. Lay the other slices on top. You may find with this kind of bread that you can squidge the edges together.

Melt a knob of butter and a little olive oil in a frying pan, over a low to medium heat. (Use no more fat than you want to eat, because the bread will absorb it all.) Slip in the sandwiches, and fry until brown beneath - 2 to 3 minutes.

Remove the sandwiches, and add a little more butter and oil. The butter may sizzle rapidly, so to keep it from burning you may need to remove the pan from the heat. Fry the other sides of the sandwiches.

Keith Floyd and Auvergne rarebit

The news that Keith Floyd had died at the early age of 65 does not come as a huge surprise. Even in his heyday he was clearly drinking too much; my publishing friends said that he was very difficult to deal with. In recent years, as his career declined, his health was the subject of various alarming bulletins.

I first watched him rather late in his TV career, and could not quite see why he was so popular. The charm and ebullience had faded, to be replaced by a more manic quality. He didn't seem to be enjoying himself much. You were uncomfortably aware of the tensions as filming took place.

The book of Floyd on France, which someone gave to me, was a nice surprise. The instructions for many of the recipes are a little too perfunctory: I don't believe that they would all work without adjustment. But the book is inspiring, nonetheless, because it is the work of a genuine enthusiast. That is the quality that fans saw in the best of his TV work.

Floyd's version of the following recipe has five to six cloves of garlic, simply squished into the mixture. Not everyone wants to eat nearly raw garlic, and especially not in the kind of dish you are most likely to eat at lunchtime. Floyd specifies Tomme de Cantal - the young, soft version of the cheese. It is hard to find. Serves 4.

4 thick slices of white bread (crusts as well, if you like), torn into chunks
Milk
1 clove garlic, chopped
50g butter
As much cheese (Cantal, Cheddar, Gruyere - that sort of thing) as you like, cut into slivers

Pour just enough milk over the bread to give it a good soaking. You want a quantity of bread that will make a layer in a large frying pan - lay it on a large plate to check.

Melt the butter in the pan, over a low heat. Add the garlic, and stir it about. Tip in the bread, and lay the cheese on top, squishing everything down with a spatula.

Allow the mixture to brown underneath. Then brown the top under the grill.

Scrambled eggs with vinegar

I have concluded that it is best not to put vinegar and salt in the water when you poach eggs: they soften the whites, which fail to cohere. But their softening effect is ideal for scrambled eggs. To four eggs, I added 1tsp of white wine vinegar, which we could not taste when the eggs were cooked. They were deliciously soft and creamy.

Melt 1tbsp butter in a non-stick pan. Beat the eggs lightly (to encourage them to set) with the salt and vinegar, pour into the pan, and cook over a low heat, stirring regularly. Meanwhile, keep another tbsp of butter, cut into pieces, to hand.

The trick is to judge the moment when to take the pan off the heat. The eggs should be approaching the perfect state, in which they are set but still creamy, but not quite there - they will carry on cooking in the hot pan. Stir in the remaining butter, which will help to arrest the cooking process.

Potato cake

I have not found the ideal recipe for potato cakes. Ones bound with flour - as in a Simon Hopkinson recipe in Roast Chicken and Other Stories - taste too floury, in my experience (though perhaps I should have made them smaller and flatter, like Scotch pancakes). Mashed potato simply formed into patties and fried tends to fall apart. But the one above worked pretty well.

It is bound with beaten egg. I used just enough egg to bind the potato, which became alarmingly squidgy. However, once placed in hot oil in the frying pan, it cohered.

My daughter complained that the texture was too dry.

Bubble and squeak

Like Tuesday's recipe, this is an adaptation from one in my friend Carolyn's recent piece in the Guardian.

2tbsp sunflower oil
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 large potatoes, cooked and mashed
1 quarter cabbage, chopped
2 cooked sausages, sliced
80g Gruyere, grated
Salt, pepper

In a frying pan, and over a low to medium heat, soften the onion and garlic with a little salt for about five minutes. Tip in the potato, cabbage, and sausage, add salt and pepper to taste, and stir everything about a bit. Flatten the mixture with a spatula, and cook it for a further five minutes, or until the underside starts to brown.

Tip the mixture into an oven dish. Sprinkle the cheese on top, and amalgamate it a little by pressing down with a fork. Bake for about 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C.

The result is pictured above. I ate it all.

Stir-fried pork and cabbage

This is a rough approximation of a recipe from a delightful piece by my friend Carolyn Hart in the Guardian.

Bunch (6) spring onions
3 cloves garlic, chopped
450g pork mince
2tbsp sunflower oil
1/2 cabbage, chopped
1 lime, juiced
1tsp sugar
1tbsp nam pla (fish sauce)
A few splashes soy sauce

Unlike Carolyn, I threw the onions, garlic and mince into the pan with the oil at the same time. I fried the mixture on a low to medium heat. It took about 25 minutes for the mince to start to brown.

Meanwhile, I steamed the cabbage for three minutes. I drained it, and added it to the browned mince, allowing it to warm up again for a few minutes. While that was going on, I dissolved the sugar in the lime juice, and stirred in the nam pla and soy sauce. I poured the mixture into the pan, stirring and allowing it to bubble for a minute.

Carolyn's addition of coriander would have been nice - but I didn't have any.

Steamed rice, refined

Every so often, cooking rice obsesses me (see below, and previous posts, including this). The following method, I reckon, works perfectly with most of the widely available brands of Basmati rice, so I should be able to give the subject a rest for a while.

1) Soak rice for 20 minutes or longer.

2) Drain, tip into a saucepan, and cover the grains with 1.5 times their volume of cold water. Add salt, if you like.

3) Bring to the boil. Turn down the heat to its lowest, cover the pan, and put a heat disperser under it.

4) Cook for a further 10 minutes. Turn off the heat, and serve when you're ready.

Pre-soaking means that the rice will soften in less water. (If you are cooking 250g or more rice, you may find that you need less than 1.5 times its volume of water. Covering it by a mm or two should work.) By the end, its surface is dry, and it separates when stirred, even after it has stood for a while. Boiled straight from the packet and then covered, it is apt to clump.

Rice, steamed

My most recently recommended method of cooking rice works very satisfactorily. (Wash, bring twice its volume of water to the boil, tip in rice and a little salt if you like, lid on, return to boil, heat down, simmer for 10 minutes, drain.) But I get restless after doing things the same way for a while.

Yesterday, I soaked my rice for half an hour - as when you soak beans or lentils, it has a softening effect, and reduces water consumption and cooking time. I measured out water to 1.5 times the volume (of rice), poured it into a pan with a little salt, and tipped in the rice (drained). The water came to just above the level of the rice.

If you cook unsoaked rice in just 1.5 times its volume of water, it may remain hard - it will absorb the water too quickly, and the subsequent steaming will not tenderise it. The pre-soaking compensates for the less efficient tenderising process; the cooking time is probably the same as for boiling unsoaked rice. I reckoned that giving the rice a longer submersion, by starting it from cold, would aid the process.

I brought the rice to the boil in the covered pan, turned down the flame, and allowed 15 minutes in total.

The cooked grains were smaller than normal. The rice clumped a bit, but separated when fluffed with a fork. The Basmati rice available here in France tends to get mushy more readily than do the brands I buy in England, so this process may work better there. I may be on to something.

Stock, covered

Stock should be simmered in an uncovered pan, is the conventional wisdom. Covered, the liquid boils too rapidly; impurities that would otherwise float to the surface, to be skimmed off, get absorbed, and turn it cloudy. A temperature just below boiling point is sufficient to extract the flavour and the collagen (which converts to gelatine).

Some years ago, I read a piece by Heston Blumenthal recommending that you cook stock in a pressure cooker. That way, he said, the flavour did not disperse. I was sceptical: was steam from a simmering pot really carrying away valuable flavour? Surely, if you wanted to concentrate flavour in a sauce, you boiled it uncovered? Nevertheless, I tried the Blumenthal technique. It produced stock that tasted flat and stale. (As I mentioned in the comments section of a previous piece.)

I wonder now whether the tired flavour was produced by overcooked vegetables. As I have written before, you should add vegetables to a stock no more than 40 minutes before the end of cooking it. And do we home cooks need to worry about cloudy stocks? We're not producing consomme - or, if we are, we should probable clarify the liquid anyway.

So now I am experimenting with covered pans. The advantage of them is that, once you are sure that the liquid is simmering gently (I use the smallest ring on the hob, and put a heat disperser under the pan), you can leave the pot for several hours without worrying that the stock is boiling away. The appearance of the stock is little different, and the flavour is at least as good.

Perhaps my next experiment should be to try the pressure cooker again, without vegetables.

Baked spinach

It may have been crude, after finding some squeaky-fresh spinach at L'Aigle market, to subject it to an hour's cooking - nutritionally wasteful, too. Still, the result was delicious.

It is adapted from a recipe in Richard Olney's Simple French Food. Pictured is half a kilo of spinach, washed and sliced and crammed into the dish, with some salt. On the surface is scattered about 2 tbsps of flour, over which is dribbled olive oil - the idea being, I think, to protect the top layer of leaves. I baked the dish for 45 minutes at gas mark 6/200C. (Looking up Olney, I see that he recommends gas mark 8/230C for the first 10 minutes, gas mark 4/180C thereafter.) Then I spread a layer (about 3tbsps) of thick creme fraiche over the surface, and baked it (I might have turned down the heat at this point) for about 10 minutes longer.

Roast Charlottes

One of the mysteries of my cooking life is how the cheap, thin, elderly roasting pan pictured above, and that I use here in France, has a far more effective non-stick surface than the expensive, solid pan I use at home.

First, I roasted a chicken - with butter between the skin and the breast, olive oil smeared on the skin, half a lemon squeezed over, and the hull of the lemon, along with two garlic cloves, placed in the cavity. (Gas mark 6/200C for 30 minutes; gas mark 2/150C for a further 60. It was a 1.7kg bird. The oven here is probably hotter than the settings imply.)

I covered the chicken in foil, and tossed the sliced Charlotte potatoes (washed first in cold water) in the sauce it had left behind, along with a little more oil. The garlic cloves were not tender, so I put those in the pan too, with a couple of sprigs of rosemary. Gas mark 6/200C, for 60 minutes, with the potatoes turned half way through.

The stickiness of the roasting juices and the starch from potatoes that had not been parboiled would, at home, have necessitated a great deal of scraping. Here, the potatoes lifted from the pan easily.

We ate the chicken and potatoes with green beans and mayonnaise - the latter containing the two cloves of roasted garlic.

Lamb stew with aubergines and chick peas

2 lamb shanks
1tbsp sunflower oil
1tsp cumin seeds
1 orange, cut into quarters
1 ladleful chicken stock
1tsp turmeric
6 unpeeled garlic cloves
Salt
1 large aubergine, cubed
1 tin chickpeas, drained

Heat the oil in a heavy casserole, and brown the shanks. You want the oil to be hot enough to brown the meat quickly, but not so hot that it burns. Once the browning has started, you should be able to turn the flame quite low.

Throw in the cumin, and let it fry for a minute or so. Then throw in the orange, and pour in the stock; add the turmeric, garlic, and salt to taste.

Put the casserole, covered, into a low oven. My Le Creuset, pictured above, will reach a very gentle simmer at gas mark S/130C, though I sometimes start at a higher heat, to get it going. Other pans, and ovens, may behave differently.

After two and a half hours, stir in the aubergine. After a further 45 minutes, stir in the chick peas. Cook for another 20 minutes or so.

At this point, I removed the meat from the bones and stirred it into the stew, which served 3, generously.

Spinach and Gruyere tart

Either my pastry-making - which is certainly fallible - or the use of Dove's gluten-free flour caused the crust of this tart to be disappointing. It was dry and powdery. But the filling was delicious.

For the pastry, I used 200g of flour, 100g of butter, and a few tbsps of water. I cut the butter into cubes, and put it and the flour into the fridge before rubbing it in. I had my water in a bowl with some ice, and added it until the mixture cohered. I wrapped the pastry in clingfilm, and put it back into the fridge.

When the time came to line the tart tin (a 22cm one), I followed Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's advice and grated it in, before pressing it down and round the edges. I blind-baked it, roughly as he describes.

For the filling, I used:

1 bag spinach
1 whole egg, 2 yolks
150ml double cream
150ml milk
100g Gruyere
Grated nutmeg
Salt

Wash the spinach, remove the thicker stalks, cram it into a pan, and put it, covered, on to a high heat. Allow it to wilt for a minute or so, then uncover the pan and continue to cook, stirring, until all the leaves are wilted. Drain.

When the spinach is cool enough to handle, squeeze out the water. Doing it thoroughly is important, because otherwise the liquid will dilute the custard and stop it setting.

Beat the eggs. Stir them into the milk and cream. Stir in the cheese. Grate in a little nutmeg and salt.

Spread the spinach over the pastry base. Pour over the custard mixture. Place the tin on a baking sheet, and bake at gas mark 3/160C for 30 to 45 minutes, until the custard is set.

Beetroot and goat's cheese

A perfect combination, and perfect too with the lentil salad I mentioned last week.

Some recommend wrapping beetroot in foil and baking it. In my limited experience, it remains moister if, after washing it, you bake it in a shallow bath of boiling water in an oven dish, covered with foil. I gave my medium-sized beetroot an hour at gas mark 6/200C.

Peel it, slice it, and top with the cheese, crumbled.

Lentil and tomato salad

100g Puy lentils
1 onion, peeled, halved through the root
1 carrot, peeled, cut into chunks
1 clove garlic
10 cherry tomatoes
1dstsp balsamic vinegar
Salt, pepper
1/2tsp Dijon mustard
2tbsp olive oil
8 sundried tomatoes, cut into small pieces

Rinse the lentils. Put them in a pan, cover with cold water with a few cms to spare, throw in the onion, carrot and garlic (they will flavour the lentils a little, one assumes), bring to the boil, and simmer, partly covered. You want them softened but not mushy - it may take 20 to 40 minutes. The water may need topping up from time to time.

Roll the tomatoes in a little oil, and bake on a baking sheet at gas mark 6/200C for about 25 minutes. It doesn't matter if they burst.

Drain the lentils. Fish out the garlic, squeeze it from its skin, and mash it into the vinegar in a bowl. Stir in salt and pepper and mustard; then whisk in the oil.

Return to the sieve, discard the onion and carrot pieces, tip the lentils into the vinaigrette, and stir. Stir in the sundried and roasted cherry tomatoes. Some herbs would be good, too.

Egg-light frittata

This frittata, cooked in a 28cm pan, contains only three eggs - because three were all I had. It means that you don't necessarily get a coherent mass of omelette to slice and lift on to plates, but in other respects works well - vegetables with an eggy accompaniment.

New potatoes, scrubbed and sliced - enough to form a layer in the pan
Olive oil
1 large red pepper, deseeded, cut into fork-sized pieces
120g mushrooms, sliced
Large knob butter
3 eggs, lightly beaten
120g hard cheese, such as Gruyere, grated

Drop the potatoes into a pan of lightly salted water, and simmer until tender. Drain.

Warm about a tbsp of olive oil in another pan, and add the peppers, frying on a low to medium heat and adjusting the flame if the oil threatens to burn. After about five minutes, add the mushrooms, with some salt, and cook until all the water they have disgorged has evaporated. Turn up the heat, if necessary, to speed this process.

Melt the butter in a heavy frying pan over a gentle heat. Pour in the eggs, and tip in the potatoes, peppers and mushrooms, spreading them out. Scatter the cheese over the top.

Cook gently until the egg shows signs of setting. Put the pan under a low grill to melt the cheese.

Tuna, beans and olives

This is a very easy lunch. It consists of a tin of tuna, drained; a tin of cannellini beans, drained and rinsed; a large handful of Crespo, "Greek-style" olives, stoned; a tbsp of mayonnaise; and a dstsp of Encona hot pepper sauce. Parsley would have been a good addition. You need the olives not only for their tang, but to relieve the beigeness of the other ingredients.

Mixed leaves and soft cheese

I can find a salad of mixed leaves, no matter how varied they are and no matter how flavoursome the dressing, rather drab to eat. There is a monotonous, leafy chewiness to it. Mixing in a soft or softish cheese, though, transforms it into something much more beguiling. Goats cheeses work particularly well. Cream cheese works fine too.

The salad above would have been even nicer with some toasted pine nuts. As it was, it contained an organic salad bag, one dstsp of white wine vinegar, a little salt, two dstsps of olive oil (you don't need more, because of the creaminess of the cheese), and about 150g of Philadelphia. As you toss the salad, the cheese breaks up and coats the leaves.

Chicken, potatoes, garlic, rosemary and lemon

This has been the best year for Jersey Royals I can remember in a long time. The potatoes are earthily flavoursome, and have a pleasing, waxy consistency. Buy them while you can. In a few weeks, many greengrocers will no longer have them, as the supermarkets hog the supplies.

Last night, we had chicken pieces roasted on a bed of sliced Jerseys, with rosemary, a whole head of garlic, and a quartered lemon. I sliced the Jerseys lengthways, about 50mm thick, and put them into a bowl of water. I rubbed them gently, to try to get rid of as much surface starch as possible. Even then, they can stick to the roasting tin; but it would be a shame to boil them first, losing more flavour.

I tossed the potatoes with olive oil, layered them in the tin, and scattered the rosemary, a whole head of garlic cloves, and the quartered lemon on top. (I did not squeeze the lemon - the acidity would have hindered the softening of the potatoes.) I rubbed a little oil over the chicken pieces, salted them, and placed them on top. I placed the tin in the oven for an hour and a quarter, turning the potatoes half way through.

We ate it with a garlic mayonnaise. Rather than use pungent, raw garlic, I removed one of the roasted cloves from the oven, and mashed that with my egg yolk and mustard.

Pot-roasted lamb shoulder

I once believed that the way to preserve tenderness in meat was not, as many people believed, to surround it in water or steam, but to roast it at a low temperature. I have since discovered that the temperature of my oven, at its lowest setting, is higher than the temperature inside a heavy casserole placed in the oven. This lamb fell off the bone. Serves 4.

1 half-shoulder of lamb
1tbsp sunflower oil
2tbsp white wine (or red wine) vinegar
1 head of garlic, separated into cloves
1 large onion, cut into chunks
1 large carrot, peeled and cut into chunks
1 sprig rosemary
2 bay leaves

In a heavy casserole, warm the oil over a medium heat. Put in the lamb, salted, browning it on all the sides it will rest on. The pan will get very hot; the trick is to turn down the heat if the oil threatens to burn, while still getting the meat to brown.

Pour in the vinegar, which may splutter and evaporate almost immediately. Tip in the garlic, onion, carrot, and herbs. Cover, and place in a gas mark S/130C oven, for three and a half to four hours.

Check on the progress from time to time. You want a very gentle simmer, and you may find that this low heat does not achieve it, at least at first. My smaller Le Creuset pan will respond to gas mark S; my larger one takes ages to warm up, and may require a gas mark 2/150C setting to achieve the same effect. You have to learn how your oven and equipment behave through trial and error.

Remove the lamb from the casserole on to a chopping board. Tip the vegetables and sauce, of which there may be a fair amount, through a sieve into a saucepan. Return the lamb to the casserole, cover it again, and return it to the oven. Squeeze the garlic from the husks into the sauce; discard the other vegetables. Simmer the sauce until you have a consistency and concentration of flavour you like. Check the seasoning.

Spaghetti and tuna

I noticed a recipe for linguine and crab in the Guardian a few weeks ago. Fancying something similar, but having neither crab nor lemon in the house, I tried the following instead. Tinned tuna does not respond well to heating: allow it simply to warm through with the hot spring onions and garlic in a covered pan. Serves 2.

250g spaghetti, spaghettini, or linguine
2tbsp olive oil
4 spring onions, sliced
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 or more dried red chilli (to taste), whizzed
1 tin tuna flakes (in spring water, preferably)
A few splashes of soy sauce
Grated zest of 1 orange
Handful parsley, chopped

Put a large pot of water on to boil. Salt it, and add the spaghetti, allowing it to fold in to the water as it softens. Keep it cooking at a lively simmer.

In a heavy pan and over a gentle flame, soften the spring onions, garlic, and chilli in the oil, for about three minutes. Turn off the heat, and stir in the tuna, soy, orange zest, and parsley. Cover the pan until the pasta is ready.

When the pasta is al dente, drain it, and tip it into the tuna mixture. Stir it through.

Baked sausages, revised

My objections to baking sausages have been that the heat required to brown them may cause them to dry up, and that the skins often get tough. Being dense, I didn't twig until I read a Jamie Oliver recipe that the obvious solution to the latter problem was to roll the sausages in the oil or fat (I use olive oil, mostly, and rub it over them with my hands) first.

My theory had been that frying sausages on the lowest possible heat was the best way to retain their tenderness and juiciness. But practice has not borne it out. Baking them at what would appear to be the dangerously high heat of gas mark 6/200C for 30 minutes, turning them once, works fine.

For previous - and possibly misleading - entries, start here.

Cucumber soup; cucumber salad

Salting appears to concentrate the sweetness in cucumbers. It tempers the sharpness of vinegar, producing a zingy, sweet-and-sour flavour. It also has the benefit of sweating out the water that might otherwise dilute the soup as you cool it.

Soup
For 2 to 3
1 cucumber
Salt
150g Greek yoghurt
1tbsp white wine vinegar
1tbsp olive oil
1 clove garlic, crushed with a little salt
Handful mint leaves, chopped
Jellied chicken stock

Peel the cucumber, cut it into dice, arrange in a colander, and sprinkle over salt, stirring the dice to distribute it. Leave for half an hour. Rinse, and dry with paper towels.

Mix the yoghurt with the vinegar, oil, garlic, and mint. Stir in the cucumber. Stir in stock until you have a consistency that suits - I used two serving spoons-worth. Check the seasoning - you may not need any more salt. Chill for at least an hour.

Salad
For 2
1/2 cucumber
Salt
1dstsp white wine vinegar
1/2tsp sugar
1tbsp herbs - mint, or dill, or a mixture

Peel the cucumber, and slice thinly. Arrange the slices in a colander, sprinkling over salt as you go. Leave for half an hour. Rinse, and dry with paper towels.

In a salad bowl, dissolve the sugar in the vinegar. Stir in the cucumber, with the herbs.

Tomato sauce, blended

I use my stick blender a lot. It saves me the effort of transferring soup to a regular blender, or of pushing it through a mouli-legumes; and, because it is less efficient than those other devices, it leaves behind a rougher, more interesting texture.

I also use the stick blender when I make a tomato sauce with onions - I like to incorporate them in the sauce.

1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
2tbsp olive oil
Salt
400g tin tomatoes (I use Cirio)
1/2tsp sugar
Bay leaf

In a heavy pan, and over a gentle heat, sweat the onions and garlic in the oil with a few grindings of salt (as recommended by Lisa in her comment on this entry) until golden - 10 to 15 minutes. Add more oil if the vegetables threaten to catch. Tip in the tomatoes. Add a little water to the tin, swirl it around to dissolve the tomato adhering to the sides, and pour this mixture into the pan too. Bring the contents to a simmer, and break up the tomatoes with a wooden spoon. Now get to work with the blender - it will work less efficiently if you allow the sauce to reduce and thicken. (If I sweated carrot and celery with the onion and garlic, I am not sure that my blender would be able to break them down.)

Return the pan to the heat, add the sugar (tinned tomatoes usually benefit from a little sweetening) and bay leaf, and simmer until thickened. Check the seasoning.

We ate this sauce with meatballs. (A recipe for which, with a slightly different version of the sauce, is here.)

Potato salad

Jersey Royal potatoes are at their best now, and as a weekend treat are worth, in my view, the £1-plus a pound they cost.

I am puzzled that so few potato salad recipes include mayonnaise. Liking potatoes is fine, and liking mayonnaise (home made) is fine; but mixing them appears to be infra dig. Is it because there is mayonnaise in ready-prepared potato salads?

Well, I like potato salad with mayonnaise. Scrape the potatoes, and if necessary cut the larger ones to correspond in size to the smaller ones; put in lightly salted, cold water, bring to a simmer and cook gently until a prod with a sharp knife tells you that they are cooked.

Meanwhile, make the mayonnaise.

Drain the potatoes, and let them cool - hot potatoes thin the mayonnaise and can split it. Cut them into smaller pieces if you like. Mix with the quantity of mayonnaise that suits you, along with salt and pepper if desired. Chives, snipped in with scissors, are a very good addition. Or spring onions - if they are likely to be harsh in flavour, soak them in boiling water first.

Hamburgers

I do not have a recipe for hamburgers. I buy steak mince from the butcher, and I form it into flattish patties of about 150g each. That's it. No seasoning, and no egg for binding - the mince is usually moist enough to hold together.

The cooking is quite hard to judge, though. In line with Matthew Fort's advice on cooking steaks in the Guardian, I heat a heavy, cast-iron pan for 10 minutes (but over a medium rather than a high flame), and I rub a little sunflower oil over the burgers. (Oil put into the pan is likely to burn.) Now I salt them, and I fry them for about 10 minutes; I turn them over after three to four minutes, and then more regularly.

I always have to cut into the burgers to see whether the insides are cooked, and I think that I am often too timid to remove the burgers from the pan at the right moment, when the rare parts are just about to cook and will do so away from the heat.

Louis' Lunch, which claims to be the home of the hamburger, serves the burgers in slices of toast rather than in rolls. It is a good idea. I find a roll too much to digest, particularly if I am eating potatoes as well. I put each burger on a slice of toast, which absorbs the juices that come out as the meat relaxes.

Crackling, cracked

Well, possibly. Such a claim is asking for punishment - like asserting that you've perfected your golf swing, or tennis serve. But I may be on to something.

Various recipes tell you to rub vinegar, as well as salt, into your pork rind. At the weekend, I tried it. First, I rubbed table salt into the rind, left it for 15 minutes, and patted dry the rind with paper towels. Then I rubbed in about a tbsp of white wine vinegar, grinded over sea salt, and - as I did last time - put my 1kg joint of belly pork into an oven pre-heated to the highest temperature.

After 40 minutes, I knew it was going to work. The crackling was dry, crunchy and golden. We could have eaten it then; but I cooked the pork for a further 2 hours, 45 minutes at the bottom of the oven at gas mark S/130C.

Why it works, or why lemon juice helps to crisp the skin of roast chicken, I am not sure. Something to do with the fats dissolving in the acid, I suppose.

Tarragon and rosemary stuffing

The stuffing I made at the weekend was similar to this one. As I wrote earlier, you do not have to be at all precise about quantities: all you are doing is binding breadcrumbs with egg (and with the butter you may have used to soften onion and garlic), and flavouring them with as large a quantity of herbs as you like. I think that lemon zest is a winning addition.

This time, I used three thick hunks of white bread, which I whizzed with the leaves from a stalk of rosemary. I softened two small onions and a clove of garlic in about a tbsp of butter for only about five minutes, until they had started to turn golden. I added a handful of tarragon, chopped, and the zest of a whole lemon, with just a little salt (bread is salty) and generous grindings of black pepper. I mixed everything by hand with one beaten egg.

I put the stuffing inside my chicken. I can see the point of cooking it apart; but it stays moister inside the bird.

Chicken Basquaise in the oven

If you can cook this dish in the oven with a minimum of fuss, why not use the technique for other chicken stews? My earlier Chicken Basquaise recipe was pretty simple; here's an even easier one.

4 chicken thighs, 4 drumsticks
1 tin tomatoes
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 onions, chopped
4 red peppers, cut into fork-sized chunks
1 bay leaf
2 tbsp olive oil
Salt

Mix the ingredients in a roasting tin, arranging the thighs skin-side up. Put into a gas mark 6/200C oven. Check the progress every 15 to 20 minutes, and turn down the heat if the dish is bubbling too energetically. (After 30 minutes, I turned down the oven to gas mark 4/180C.) Once the tomatoes are cooking, you can break them up with a wooden spoon. You need to give the ingredients a stir quite regularly, and if they threaten to catch at the edges you can thin them with a little stock. (Or add half a stock cube at the beginning, and add water to the tin when necessary.)

Cook for 60 to 75 minutes.

Leek and potato soup

If you've ever made the mistake of mashing potatoes in a food processor, you'll know that the blades give them the consistency of Uhu. As do the blades of a liquidiser when you blend the potatoes in a soup. The solution is to cook the potatoes separately, and mash them. Serves 4.

3 medium potatoes
1 garlic clove, unpeeled
3 medium leeks
Chicken stock
Salt

Peel the potatoes, and cut them into chunks as you would for mash. (I usually cut mine into pieces about 2cm square.) Cook them in about 200ml of chicken stock, with a little salt. If you put a lid on the pan, the potatoes do not have to be submerged in liquid - and it is better to go easy on the stock now than to end up with a thin soup.

Cut off the roots and the tough leaves of the leeks. Split them down the middle, then slice them vertically, and wash them. Allow them to soak for a few minutes, so that the grit can disperse. Drain them, and put them into a saucepan with about 25ml stock, a knob of butter, and a little salt. Cook them gently in a covered pan until soft and glossy (about 10 to 15 minutes), adding a little more stock if they threaten to catch.

When the potatoes are soft, fish out the garlic, slip it from its skin, return it to the pan, and mash it with the potato.

Add enough stock to the leeks to enable you to blend them. Put them in a liquidiser, or use a stick blender.

Combine the leeks and the potato, adding more stock if necessary. Warm up the soup gently - if you boil it, you'll bring out the glueyness in the potatoes. Check the seasoning. Away from the heat, stir in another knob of butter.

Chicken with aubergines, lemon and garlic

My most recent chicken saute recipes (here and here) have involved a certain amount of fussing: do you cover the pot or not? If you leave it uncovered, will the chicken, and other ingredients, cook through and tenderise?

It need not be that complicated. You do not even need to brown the chicken pieces first.

4 chicken thighs, 4 drumsticks
2tbsp olive oil
2 aubergines, cubed
1 head garlic - 1 clove peeled and chopped, the rest left whole
1 lemon, quartered
200ml chicken stock
1 bay leaf
Salt

Mix the ingredients in a roasting tin, and bake at gas mark 6/200C for an hour. Stir from time to time, and allow the thighs to sit skin side up for a while, so that the skin browns. Add more stock, depending on how much sauce you want and on whether the contents of the tin threaten to dry out.

Chicken legs will take this blast of heat without becoming tough. If you have breasts as well, add them about 25 minutes before the end of cooking.

You could add minced chillis to the dish, stirring them in at the end. Or (mixed with the stock at the start of cooking) harissa. Serve with rice or couscous.

One-pan lamb chops

Allegra McEvedy has offered some very attractive recipes in the Guardian recently. I think I shall give this one a miss, however. Perhaps it's unfair not to have a go; but there are several details that make me think it would give me trouble.

You fry spiced lamb chops, then onion rings, then slices of butternut squash. You layer them in the frying pan with broccoli, pour stock over it all, and bake for 10 minutes.

First, I would not use a cast iron pan of the type illustrated in the newspaper. Any seasoning that the pan has had - the accretion of a slick layer thanks to cooking fat - will be compromised by the deglazing effect of the stock.

Allegra McEvedy can peel and slice a squash in four minutes, while her onion rings are frying. That is beyond my competence. My biggest reservation, though, concerns the cooking time. Squash is often tough. You cannot rely on it to tenderise after a brief frying and a 10 minute immersion in stock, as it receives here - even assuming that the stock is sufficient to immerse it. The broccoli might be a problem, too. If it does not touch the liquid, it might remain crunchy; if it is immersed, it will overcook.

What do you do with all the liquid at the end? Use some as sauce, and the rest later as stock, I suppose.

Gravy with roast chicken

Roasting a chicken, I usually simmer the giblets (excluding the liver) with a few vegetables in a small saucepan, and add this stock to the juices in the roasting tin.

This weekend, I put the giblets and the vegetables (an onion and a carrot, both sliced, along with some garlic cloves) in the tin with the bird, roasting them alongside it for 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C. Then I poured in half a glass of white wine, stirring giblets and vegetables into the liquid, and turned down the oven to gas mark 2/150C for a further 90 minutes (it was a 2kg bird). Every so often, as the liquid evaporated, I added a little water. I doubt whether I used more than 150ml liquid in total; the chicken contributed its own juices.

What was left at the end of the two hours was, strained, our gravy - nothing else added.

My reservation about this technique is that a steamy atmosphere in the oven might cook the chicken too efficiently, drying out the breast. But that was not a problem in this instance.

Fishcakes in breadcrumbs

One can never match at home the perfect breadcrumb coating that restaurants achieve. But one can get closer to it than the messy process of applying the crumbs suggests is possible.

For fishcakes, use a similar volume of fish and potato. After boiling the potatoes and draining them, allow them to cool for a while before mashing them. They seem to become starchier - a quality you don't want in ordinary mash but that helps the cakes to cohere.

To cook the fish, I usually put it into a warm gratin dish, pour over a half pint or so of milk (flavoured with bay, salt and peppercorns), cover with foil, and bake at gas mark 6/200C for about 15 minutes. I use the milk to make a bechamel, perhaps with parsley.

Flake the fish into the mash, stir, and form into cakes. Have to hand a plate of flour, a dish of beaten egg, and a plate of breadcrumbs. Coat the fishcakes in flour, dip them in the egg, and turn them in the crumbs. This last process is messy, and sticky; you'll be lucky to be able to achieve a consistent coating.

Heat a generous quantity of sunflower oil, with butter if you like (perhaps to a depth of 0.5cms), in a frying pan, until a breadcrumb sizzles in it. Fry the fishcakes over a low to medium heat until brown on each side and warmed through. You'll find that the cooked coating looks more impressive than the raw one did.

Aligot

If you have eaten aligot (cheesy mash) in its native region, the Auvergne, you may have found it somewhat gluey. This quality comes from the beating it has received in the pan, as the cook has combined the mashed potato and the cheese, over heat. The process releases a good deal of starch.

It is not unpleasant, and can be comforting. But if you want to avoid it, you can warm through the mixture in the oven.

The quantity of cheese may seem high. I often use more than this. For 2.

4 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
1 garlic clove
50g butter
200g Cantal or similar cheese (Cheddar is fine)
Salt, pepper

Put the potatoes and garlic into lightly salted, cold water in a saucepan, bring to a boil, and simmer until soft. Drain, and allow to steam for a minute or two.

Heat the oven to gas mark 7/220C. Warm a gratin dish in it.

Put the butter into the hot saucepan. Pass the potato and garlic through a mouli-legumes into the pan (or slip the garlic from its skin, and mash it and the potato with a masher). Stir in the butter until melted. Stir in the cheese.

Tip the mixture into the gratin dish, cover with foil, and give it 10 minutes in the oven to warm through.

Red cabbage salad

I have come to admit to myself, rather late in life, that I am not especially fond of cooked red cabbage. Perhaps my problem is the assertiveness of the acid content, which is essential to preserve its colour. I like it raw, though.

Quarter red cabbage, shredded (this may be a job best done by a mandolin) and washed
2tbsp balsamic vinegar
5tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Salt, pepper
3tbsp raisins, soaked in hot water for 20 minutes
3tbsp pine kernels, toasted in a saucepan over a very gentle heat

Grind salt to taste into the vinegar in a salad bowl, stir to dissolve, and whisk in the oil. Throw in the cabbage, raisins, and pine nuts, grind over pepper to taste, and toss.

Chicken with balsamic vinegar

In my most recent chicken saute recipes (here, for example), I have suggested covering the pot for a while, before uncovering it to allow the sauce to reduce. This one has vinegar, albeit of a mild kind, and requires reduction right from the start - hence the uncovered pan throughout. The disadvantage was that the cloves of garlic did not soften thoroughly. Nevertheless, I squeezed them from their skins about 10 minutes before the end of cooking, and mashed them into the sauce.

4 chicken thighs
4 drumsticks
1dstsp sunflower oil
Salt
150ml balsamic vinegar
6 garlic cloves, unpeeled
Chicken stock
Sprig of rosemary

In a heavy casserole or saute pan large enough to contain the chicken pieces in a single layer, fry the thighs and drumsticks, salted, gently, until brown. You should not need more oil, because the chicken pieces will exude their own fat. Pour in the vinegar, throw in the garlic cloves and rosemary and simmer gently, uncovered, for an hour to an hour and a half. (I like my chicken well-cooked; and this method will not tenderise it as efficiently as would a covered pan.)

When the vinegar turns syrupy and threatens to catch, thin it with a little stock; and keep adding more liquid as necessary. When you are nearly ready to serve, fish out the garlic cloves, slip the garlic from the skins, and mash it into the sauce.

Rhubarb fool

This would be the easiest dish in the world were it not for the slight difficulty of judging the consistency of the rhubarb. It should be sludgy, not runny; and that usually means that you have to reduce the liquid it throws off.

The quantities below served 4 people. The rhubarb sticks were thick, and the volume of cream was about a third of that of the rhubarb.

6 sticks rhubarb
1 1/2tbsp caster sugar (or more, or less, according to taste)
284ml double cream
1 tsp vanilla essence

Wash the rhubarb, cut it into short lengths, and throw it into the pan with 50ml water. You need the water to stop it catching, even though you'll find that you have an abundance of liquid later. Cover the pan, and cook over a medium heat. Add the sugar after a few minutes. (If you put the sugar in right away, it might catch on the pan and caramelise.) Turn down the heat once the contents of the pan are cooking properly. Allow the rhubarb to soften - about 10 to 15 minutes.

Drain the rhubarb in a sieve over another pan. Don't throw away the liquid it sheds: boil and reduce it, until you have a liquid with a syrupy consistency. Recombine with the rhubarb, mix it up into a mush, and cool. Add more sugar, if you like.

Whisk the cream, with a balloon whisk, for a minute or so, until it stands in peaks. Be careful: if you go on too long, the cream will get very stiff. Fold the cream into the rhubarb, with the vanilla.

Divide the fool between four glass bowls, cover with cling film, and chill.

Lamb shoulder, potatoes boulangeres

One of the principal ways in which the experience of the home cook differs from the one promised in recipes is that we constantly have to check and adjust our oven temperatures. Even when we're confident about our ovens and utensils, we cannot be sure that a dish put in an oven at gas mark 4/180C for an hour, say, will behave as it is supposed to. This is what I found when I cooked a shoulder of lamb yesterday.

I had studded the joint with garlic and rosemary, anointed it with oil, seasoned it, and left it overnight in a roasting tin in the fridge, with a foil covering. At 8.30 in the morning, I placed it in a gas mark S/130C oven, still with its foil - the theory being that the foil would keep the temperature of the tin below the oven temperature, and so help to cook the meat gently. After a few hours, all was going well.

I peeled and sliced potatoes, and put them into cold water, giving them a good rinse. I then changed the water. I did this because I had decided not to parboil the potatoes, and because I wanted to get rid of as much of their surface starch as possible. Surface starch can cause them to stick, and also forms a tough, rather than crunchy, crust.

At 11.30am I removed the roasting tin from the oven, lifted the joint on to a board, and tipped in the drained potatoes, mixing them with a ladleful of chicken stock and some splashes of olive oil. I seasoned them with salt. I put the joint back on top, covered the tin again, and returned it to the oven. I turned up the temperature to gas mark 3/160C. I wanted the potatoes to steam, before I uncovered the dish and browned them.

After 45 minutes, there was very little activity inside the foil. Eventually, to get things going, I turned the dial right up to 7/220C. I took out the joint at 1.05pm, lifted the tin to a higher shelf, and gave the potatoes 20 minutes to brown, uncovered, while the meat rested.

I have noticed before that a roasting tin, particularly a crowded one, does not heat up very efficiently when covered. Still, the lamb, being a forgiving cut, showed no ill effects from the blasting heat.

Kale gratin

If you have a vegetable box, you probably receive quite a lot kale during the winter months. Last week, it was a vivid purple. But, no matter how attractive in appearance, kale can have a harsh, chewy consistency. Preparing it as a gratin can soften it, and make it palatable even to those who are wary of brassicas. Serves 4.

Bagful of kale
About 50g butter
3dstsp flour
About 350ml milk
100g grated Cheddar, Gruyere, or some such
Scraping of nutmeg
Salt, pepper
2dstsp grated Parmesan

Warm a gratin dish in a gas mark 5/190C oven.

Strip the kale from the stalks, and wash it. Pour water a couple of cms deep into a saucepan, bring it to the boil, shove in the kale, and cook it, covered, for about five minutes, or until wilted. Drain, and squeeze out as much water as you can.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Stir in the flour, and cook very gently for a minute or so. (Use more butter if this roux is too thick.) Turn up the heat slightly, and pour in the milk a few splashes at a time, incorporating each addition before pouring in more. Stop when you have a thick but pourable sauce, and let it bubble, while you stir, for a minute or so. Add salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste. Stir in the Cheddar or Gruyere. Mix the sauce and the kale. (I found that there was a lot of kale in my bag, so I made the mixture a little more liquid by adding some cream from the fridge.)

Tip into the gratin dish, sprinkle over the Parmesan, and bake for 20 minutes. If you'd like a browner top, finish it under the grill.

Pot-roasted chicken

Pot-roasting enables you to cook a joint when you have a hob but not an oven. But because people like the technique, they pot-roast in the oven anyway - as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall does in this Guardian recipe.

If you follow his advice to the letter, you will need a very large pot. I cooked a 2kg chicken at the weekend, and I found that my largest, oval Le Creuset casserole was only just large enough. The lid was not a snug fit.

The second point worth noting before following this recipe is that a large Le Creuset such as mine takes a long time to warm through. After an hour at gas mark 4/180C, the cooking process is still at an early stage. So the timing Fearnley-Whittingstall gives may not be adequate.

The third point is that 10 minutes at the end may not be long enough to brown the skin - although some browning will have taken place inside the pot. In this recipe, from the River Cottage website, the technique is different: you uncover the dish 30 minutes before the end. Again, I think that his suggested overall cooking time may be inadequate.

I browned my chicken in a little oil and butter first, before throwing in bay, rosemary, onion, and whole garlic cloves.

The fourth point is that, once cooking really is underway, the steamy atmosphere of the pot will cook the chicken more efficiently than would the unmediated heat of the oven. It means that the chicken breast is at greater risk of drying out than it is when roasted conventionally.

It seems to me that if you want to cook your chicken in a pot, you might as well joint it first, add the breast portions just 25 minutes or so before the end, and call it a stew.

Parsnip soup

Is it always necessary to cut the central, woody parts from large parsnips? Yesterday, making a soup, I did not bother, and did not find any woody quality, or woody fragments, in the cooked product. Indeed, the soup had an extraordinarily sweet flavour, reminiscent of marmalade. Serves 2.

1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1tsp cumin seeds
Knob of butter
Sunflower oil
2 large parsnips, peeled and cut into small pieces (it's quite hard work)
Stock, or water and half a stock cube
1/3tsp cayenne pepper
Salt

Cook the onion, garlic and cumin, gently, in the butter, with a little oil to prevent the mixture from sticking. Allow the onion five to 10 minutes to soften.

Throw in the parsnips, and pour in the stock (about 500ml, probably - you could heat it first, to save time) to come to the top of the vegetables. Add the cayenne, and salt to taste.

Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook on a low heat for about 15 minutes, or until the parsnips are soft. Pass through a mouli, or put in a blender, or use (as I did) a stick blender.

Cabbage gratin

I have seen many recipes for vegetable gratins, but not one that includes cabbage. Why that should be, I don't know: cabbage works just as well in this context as chard, say, or spinach, particularly with a strong cheese such as Cheddar.

This recipe involves my new favourite method of cooking cabbage. For two.

1 onion, chopped
Butter and a little sunflower oil, for frying the onion
Half a cabbage, such as Savoy, chopped and washed
About 35g butter
2dstsp flour
About 350ml milk
100g Cheddar, grated
Grating of nutmeg
1tsp Dijon mustard
2tbsp Parmesan, grated

Heat the oven to gas mark 8/230C. Warm a gratin dish. (I put mine into the grill section above the oven.)

Cook the onion, over a gentle heat, in enough butter to prevent its catching (the addition of a little oil is helpful). Give it five to 10 minutes to soften and start to turn golden. Throw in the wet cabbage, and cook, on a slightly higher heat and stirring regularly, until the leaves have wilted and softened - another five to 10 minutes. (The green colour deepens.)

Meanwhile, melt a large knob of butter in a small saucepan, and add the flour. (Use more butter if this roux is too thick.) Cook the roux, very gently, for about a minute - this process helps to soften the floury flavour. Turn up the heat to medium, and add the milk, a few splashes at a time, incorporating each before adding the next. Stop when you have a fairly thick sauce (which liquid from the vegetables will thin). Bubble it for a minute or so, and add the Cheddar, nutmeg, and mustard, with a little salt. (Remember that the cheese is salty.)

Stir the sauce into the cabbage and onions, and tip the mixture into the warm gratin dish; sprinkle the surface with Parmesan, and put the dish into the hot oven for five minutes. (You're just giving it a blast of heat. There's no need to cook it for any longer.) Brown the surface under the grill, if you like.

Don't blanch the lasagne

From a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi, I found a way to ensure that non pre-cook lasagne was properly cooked (as I wrote here). Before that, I had always blanched the pasta sheets before assembling the pasta.

However, last Saturday in the Guardian Ottolenghi gave a recipe for mushroom lasagne, and told us to pour boiling water on to the sheets, leave them for two minutes, and dry them on a tea towel.

This is a very bad idea. The sheets will stick together, and you will have trouble prising them apart.

Use the dry sheets, breaking them up as necessary to fit them in the dish. As I wrote in the earlier entry: cover the dish, after you have assembled the lasagne, with foil, and cook for 30 minutes at gas mark 4/180C, and then for another 30 minutes at gas mark 2/150C. Test the lasagne with a knife. If the pasta is soft, you could scatter parmesan on top and brown the dish under a grill.

Cabbage, sweated not stir-fried

Many recipes, Chinese-influenced ones especially, tell you simply to fry cabbage rather than to boil or steam it first. I find that the flavour of fried cabbage can be a bit assertive. But stir-frying in a wok over a fierce heat is not the only way. For a simple lunch, you can simply cook it over a modest flame, part frying it and part sweating it.

For two people, slice an onion and cook it gently in a tbsp or more of sunflower (or groundnut) oil, with a chopped clove of garlic, until it softens and starts to turn golden. Meanwhile, take half a Savoy (or other green) cabbage, cut that in half, remove the core, slice it, and halve the slices. Place the cabbage in a bowl of water.

Throw the cabbage, drained but still wet, into the pan with the onion. Add a little minced ginger too, if you like. Cook, stirring, for five to 10 minutes, until the water has evaporated and the cabbage is wilted and softened. Add a few splashes of soy sauce, and some toasted sesame oil.

Serve with rice or noodles.

Rice - one further refinement

I shall post this entry, and then I shall shut up on the subject for a while. Since writing last Thursday, I have discovered that you need use only twice the volume of water to rice if you cover the pan. So:

Wash rice (75g a person is a generous quantity) in a sieve, or by giving it a quick bath in a bowl and draining it. Do you need to wash it? I am not sure; but it can be a bit dusty.

(If you do believe that you should wash it, then surely you should wash the rice you use in a risotto as well? Experts tell you not to, in order to avoid losing any starch and in order to ensure that the grains are properly coated in fat before you add the liquid. I doubt whether damp grains would affect the consistency or flavour of the finished dish at all.)

I have a measuring cup which holds the right amount of rice for one person. So, cooking just for myself, I pour two cups of water into a pan, bring it to the boil, tip in the rice, and cover. I start counting 10 minutes from that point. When the contents of the pan are simmering again (steam starts puffing from the lid), I turn down that flame to its lowest.

After 10 minutes, there is usually just a little water left in the pan. Drain the rice in a sieve. You can return it to the pan to stay hot: put a paper towel over the top, and the lid on top of that.

This technique works perfectly with most of the widely available Basmati brands.

Rice again

Since blogging compulsively (see this post, and previous ones) about ways of cooking rice, I have continued to experiment. I have discovered that a lot of what I have written before, particularly in my book, is wrong. Well, not wrong exactly - it won't lead anyone to make disastrous mistakes; but not based on entirely correct premises.

The key point about rice - obvious, really - is not to overcook it. So when I wrote that soaking rice always caused it to go sticky on me, I should have realised that it was not the soaking that was at fault: the problem was that soaking softened the rice, reducing its absorbent qualities and its cooking time. If I then cooked it by the absorption method, I ended up with a sticky mass of overcooked grains that had been sitting together in a covered pan.

Nevertheless, it remains preferable to cook rice in the smallest volume of water possible, to reduce the dispersion of nutrients. So you need to know, with each variety you use, the optimum cooking time, as well as the amount of water it will absorb.

Ten minutes is about right for most commercially available types of Basmati; and I find that three times its volume of water works well. I bring the water to boil in a saucepan, and give the rice a rinse, either by putting it in a sieve and running water through it, or by putting it in a bowl and giving it a quick bath. When the water is boiling, I tip in the rice, bring the pan back to a simmer, and simmer it for 10 minutes (counting from the moment when the rice hits the water - even when there is a large quantity that takes longer to come back to the boil). When or if the water reduces to the level of the top of the rice, I cover the pan and turn down the heat. At the 10-minute mark, I drain away whatever water is left.

You can hold the rice, once drained, in the pan, with a paper towel on top and the lid clamped on top of that. It might clump together a little, though. The steam will continue to cook it for a while - another reason why you need to be careful not to simmer it for too long.

A friend recently brought me some organic rice from Indonesia. It takes about 12 to 13 minutes to cook, and turns the surrounding water very starchy. I find that the only way to prevent this rice from becoming sticky is to cook it in at least five times its volume of water. But, with most other brands I have tried, this ratio is not necessary.

Gluten-free rhubarb crumble

I have mentioned that I now need to cook gluten-free. Yesterday, I tried a crumble with Doves gluten-free flour. It was fine - though softer, less crumbly, than a wheat flour version. I thought I detected a faint, soapy (but not unpleasant) aftertaste. But I'll try it again.

The sticks of rhubarb I cooked a couple of weeks ago were quite thick. This batch was thin, as forced rhubarb usually is. That is one reason why the cooking time is shorter; also, I felt that it needed only to be tender, rather than cooked down to compote consistency.

Serves 2

4 sticks rhubarb, cut into short lengths and washed
2dstsp muscovado sugar
1/2 cinnamon stick
1tsp vanilla essence

80g Doves gluten-free flour
40g unsalted butter, cut into slivers
1dstsp muscovado sugar

Turn the oven up to full heat. Place the rhubarb, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla essence in an oven dish, and bake for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the rhubarb is tender to the sharp point of a knife. You may want to give the mixture a stir.

It occurred to me that a way to get butter into manageable portions to rub into flour (for crumble or pastry) would be to cut it off the block in slivers. Measure the 80g of flour, and then shave thin pieces of butter to drop on to it until the scales move up to 120g. Rub in with your fingertips - you do not have to be absolutely thorough. Stir through the sugar.

Scatter the crumble on to the rhubarb, and bake for 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C, or until the top is golden.

Bacon hock

My butcher sells bacon hocks for about £2.50 each. There is enough meat on one to feed three to four people - and it is delicious.

Some smoked hocks are very salty, and require soaking for 12 hours or longer. The ones I get do not. I put a hock into a stockpot (or pasta pan), cover it with water, bring it to a simmer, skim off the froth, and turn down the heat to its lowest. My pot has a heavy base; a low flame causes the liquid (with the pot uncovered) merely to show a few bubbles rising to the surface, rather than to simmer. Gentle heat tenderises the meat without drying it out. (Recipes that imply that meat will remain moist if surrounded by liquid or vapour - from the effect of a foil wrapping, say - are misleading. Indeed the liquid, because it is so effective at cooking, will dry out the meat faster.) I give it two hours.

It seems unadventurous to poach the hock in plain water - though it is hard to believe that a few surrounding vegetables will have much effect. However, you can keep the liquid and use it as a stock; for that reason, I usually throw in an onion or two, a couple of carrots, celery if I have it, and peppercorns.

Lighter batter

Farah, who blogs at Confessions of a Novice Baker, kindly credits as the source (adapted) for her recipe for Yorkshire pudding. I would not put anyone off making a batter in this way; but I am rather inclined nowadays to use half milk (semi-skimmed, too) and half water, for a lighter, less gooey result. Many recipes suggest you use two eggs, or even three, with these quantities of flour and milk. Perhaps egginess is desirable in pancakes; but not in baked batters, in my view.

Another common suggestion is that you should let batters stand, for at least half an hour and preferably longer. When I made a batter some three hours in advance of cooking it, I found it heavy and sticky when cooked, as if the resting period had caused it to become more glutenous. Perhaps I was just unfortunate.

Here is a recipe for toad in the hole.

Baked rhubarb

To retain rhubarb chunks rather than turning them to mush, try baking them. You need a high heat to get them going, though; and you may find that they take 30 to 45 minutes to braise, even on maximum. Keep checking, and stirring. If you cover the dish, you may end up with too much liquid.

These quantities served 2 of us, being greedy; they might do for 3, or even 4.

3 big sticks rhubarb, washed and cut into chunks
Juice of 1 orange
2tbsp muscovado sugar (or more, to taste - check at the end)
1/2 cinnamon stick
Grating of nutmeg
1tsp vanilla essence

Throw everything into an oven dish and bake (uncovered) at a high heat, stirring from time to time.

Cochin coconut curry

Emma Bradford kindly sent me some spice packages from Season & Spice. Each package comes with a recipe card, and consists of just the right quantity of spice to make the dish.

The curry recipe is for 4. I made it for 2, using the same quantity of spice and coconut milk, but cutting back the other ingredients (and leaving out the two tomatoes specified).

1 onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
Sunflower or groundnut oil, knob of butter
1/2tsp grated ginger
1tbsp keralan curry powder (it consists of coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, black pepper, chilli flakes, star anise, cardamom, and cloves)
400ml tin coconut milk
150ml chicken stock (the recipes gives 200ml water)
Leftover chicken, diced, for 2 (if you use fresh chicken, you probably need to simmer it in the sauce for 20 to 30 minutes)
1tsp mustard seeds
Handful curry leaves
1 lime

Gently fry the onion and the garlic in the butter and enough oil to prevent them from catching, until they are golden. Add the ginger and the curry powder, and cook gently for a further 10 minutes. (You want the powder to lose its powdery taste, but you have to be careful that it does not burn.)

Add the coconut milk and the stock, with salt to taste, and simmer gently, uncovered, for 30 minutes. (You want the sauce to concentrate a little.)

Stir in the chicken, and let it warm through. Meanwhile, cook the mustard seeds and curry leaves in a tbsp of oil until the seeds pop and the leaves wilt. Stir them into the curry, with a squeeze or two of lime juice.

Serve with boiled rice, in bowls.

Christmas things - salt cod, barley pudding, sprouts, chestnuts

I have done an encore in the New Statesman (where I used to write a food column): a piece about Christmas food. It includes a couple of recipes. The first is a brandade of salt cod (it's a rather luxurious way of eating something associated with asceticism on Christmas Eve); the second, an Armenian pudding consisting of sweetened pearl barley.

A brandade is a good deal easier to make now we have food processors. I had a culinary disaster when I tried to follow Richard Olney's recipe in his otherwise marvellous Simple French Food, beating the fish with olive oil in a saucepan over high heat. All that happened was that the flesh firmed up and fried.

Two further Christmas tips.

Sprouts

Perhaps one wants sprouts with the Christmas dinner simply to be steamed or boiled, and tossed in a little butter. But, if the rest of the meal were not so rich, I should recommend steaming (or boiling) them for just a couple of minutes, slicing them, and sauteing them in sunflower oil, with garlic. Stir in a little soy sauce at the end. Some people say that you should not cook them in water at all, but simply shred and fry them.

Chestnuts

Peeling chestnuts is a bit fiddly, but manageable, and worth it - the flavour beats that of chestnut puree. Slit the shells with a knife, and drop the chestnuts in boiling water; turn off the heat, cover, and leave for five minutes. Remove the chestnuts and peel them one-by-one - they will not be impossible to handle. Yesterday, I stuffed some cabbage leaves with sausage meat mixed with chestnuts whizzed with a clove of garlic, and the grated zest of a lemon.

Crackling at high heat

My first entry on this blog, back in 2006, boasted about how I had achieved the perfect combination of tender belly pork and crisp crackling. I should have been mindful that cookery is like tennis or golf: claiming that you have perfected some technique is foolhardy, and likely to be punished. My record with crackling since then has been patchy.

Two recent Guardian recipes have offered conflicting advice. Yotam Ottolenghi's suggests cooking your pork belly at the highest oven temperature for an hour, before turning down the dial. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's, for shoulder of pork, tells you to wrap the meat in foil and to cook it slowly, before slicing off the crackling and crisping it at a high temperature. It is the Fearnley-Whittingstall method that has usually gone wrong for me: the crackling goes from rubbery to burned, without passing through an intermediate stage of crunchiness.

So I decided to try Ottolenghi's advice, though nervous of cooking meat at such a high temperature (and puzzled that he should surround it with liquid - surely the steam will compromise the crackling?) I had prepared the crackling by leaving out the pork, uncovered, for several hours before cooking; and by sprinkling it with salt, allowing it to sweat, and patting it dry with a paper towel.

My piece of pork was a kilo smaller than his, and was very brown on top after 45 minutes; that was when I turned down the dial, to gas mark 1/150C, and cooked the joint for a further hour and a quarter.

The crackling was not quite crisp. I sliced it off, and returned it to the oven (meanwhile resting the meat, which I covered in foil), at gas mark 7/220C, for another 30 minutes.

It worked very well. The belly pork, being a forgiving cut, remained tender in spite of the blasting; and the crackling was crisp. Perhaps it is the first phase of cooking that is crucial.

Cannellini beans, onion, and harissa

Recipes usually tell you to drain and rinse tinned beans before cooking them; but that seems a bit fussy. You might as well warm them in their briny, slightly slimy liquid, and drain them when warm.

Last night, making a side dish to go with sausages, I gently fried an onion and a chopped clove of garlic in some olive oil and butter. Meanwhile, I warmed through a tin of cannellini beans in their liquid. When the onions were golden, I drained the beans, and stirred them into the onions with a tsp of harissa. (It's easier to warm the beans in liquid than to drain them first and then cook them, dry, with the onions.)

Nigella Lawson's idea, of adding lemon zest to the beans, is probably good. They need a vivid flavour to perk them up.

Cottage pie

As I have mentioned, I am not using much flour in my cooking at the moment. I find that it is quite possible - indeed, an improvement - to leave flour out of many recipes, including ones for which it is often considered indispensable. For example, in Shepherd's (or cottage) pie, in which it is supposed to help the sauce and mince cohere; as in a Bolognese, well-cooked vegetables (in this case, onions) and a slow reduction of the liquid do the job just as well. And the bonus is that you're dispensing with a flavour-deadening ingredient.

For 3 to 4.

200g pork mince
200g beef mince
2 medium onions, chopped
Sunflower oil, butter
2 bay leaves
150ml chicken stock (I used half a stock cube and water)
1tbsp tomato ketchup
Few shakes soy sauce
5 medium potatoes
35g butter

In a heavy pan, and over a gentle heat, fry the onions in just enough oil and butter to prevent their catching, stirring occasionally. Let them become golden brown. This may take 30 to 40 minutes.

The easiest way to brown the mince is to form it into patties (about eight), and to cook them on a hot grill pan for about a minute each side. Transfer to a bowl. Pour some of the stock into the pan, let it bubble and take up the sediments, and pour it into the bowl with the mince.

When the onions are ready, tip in the mince and juice, and add the bay, ketchup and soy. Bring to a very gentle simmer, breaking up the patties with a wooden spoon. Cook, uncovered, until the stew is thickened - moist, but not runny. Check the seasoning.

Meanwhile, peel the potatoes, cut them up (you could cut a medium potato into eight pieces), cover them with cold, lightly salted water, and simmer until soft. Drain, and allow them to dry, perhaps in the hot pan. Mash. If they seem too powdery, add a little warm milk (according to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the Guardian recently, cold milk causes mash to turn gluey) - just enough to cause them to cohere.

Tip the mince into a warm oven dish. Spread the potato on top. Rather than mixing the potato with the butter, you can cut the butter into slivers and scatter it over the surface, to brown.

Cook at gas mark 6/200C for 30 minutes, or until brown on top.

Schama's Bolognese

Here is Simon Schama's article from the Guardian about the perfect Bolognese sauce. There are two questionable details: Schama tells you to add the wine after the stock, a procedure that might result in too winey a sauce; and he does not tell you whether to leave the pan covered or not. The Elizabeth David version, at the foot of the piece, tells you to cover the pan: I think that her sauce will be too runny. I like Marcella Hazan's, immediately below the Schama piece: you add milk, and let it evaporate; then wine, and let that evaporate; and then tomatoes, and let the sauce reduce again (with the pan uncovered all the while).

On Saturday, Hugh Feanley-Whittingstall's sauce, to be included in a lasagne, was similar to the Hazan version.

No-bake lemon and lime cheesecake

A return to a subject that at one time was threatening to be an obsession, but that I haven't tackled for a while. There is a similar recipe to this one in my book, but with digestive biscuits. I reckon that this 3:1 biscuit:butter ratio works as well, or better, than the 2:1 I have recommended previously.

You need a 20cm flan dish or tin. Serves 6 to 8.

150g ginger biscuits
50g butter
227ml double cream (that is the size of the Yeo Valley pot)
200g cream cheese (a standard pack)
397g condensed milk (a standard tin)
1 lemon, zest and juice
1 lime, zest and juice

Whizz the biscuits to crumbs in a food processor. Melt the butter over a low heat in a small saucepan. Tip in the crumbs, stir until thoroughly coated. Grease your dish or tin, and tip in the biscuit mixture, spreading it over the surface and compacting it with the back of a spoon. Put the dish into the freezer for 30 minutes to an hour.

Whip the cream until it stands in soft peaks. You have to be careful to stop as soon as it gets to this stage: from there, it moves rapidly to complete stiffness.

In a separate bowl, whip together the cream cheese and condensed milk. Some recipes suggest you can thicken the milk by whipping: that does not work for me, perhaps because I am lazy or impatient. No matter. Mix in the lemon and lime zest and juice.

Fold the cream into the cheese/milk/citrus mixture. Pour the filling on to the frozen (or very cold) base, cover, and return to the fridge for at least a couple of hours before serving.

Sauce without flour

My wife has developed, or become aware of, a gluten intolerance. That means no pasta, obviously; no breadcrumbs; and no flour-thickened sauces. The last constraint is good for stews, I think. But sometimes, in other recipes, you want an ingredient to bind things together.

Last night, I made some spinach with cream and cheese. Normally, I would use a bechamel sauce. This time, I put about 150ml of creme fraiche into a saucepan, and simmered it until thick. Meanwhile, I cooked a bagful of spinach, drained it, and squeezed out as much liquid as I could. I stirred about three heaped tbsps of Gruyere into the cream, and tipped in the spinach.

The sauce turned runny. Perfectly pleasant, but not what I had aimed for.

Boeuf Bourguignon notes

Sometimes, I give a recipe without explaining what's going on. It's a habit that I sometimes find irritating in others, so I thought I'd revisit last week's beef Bourguignon, and give a few notes about what I did.

Marinating. Sometimes, marinades do not have much effect. But this one should do, because of the acid in the wine. And sugars in the wine caramelise on the surface of the meat when you brown it - so you get two effects that enhance the flavour of the dish.

Browning the onions. See this entry.

Browning the meat. See this entry (but you don't need the oil this time).

Deglazing. The liquid picks up the flavoursome, stuck bits from the pan; and, as it bubbles furiously, it loses a good part of its alcohol. Raw spirit in the dish would of course be overpowering.

Covering the meat with the liquid. In theory, the liquid will help to keep the meat tender. The gently bubbling sauce cannot get hotter than 100C; whereas exposed meat within a covered casserole may be subjected to a higher temperature. However, unless you want a thin, runny sauce, you'll need to reduce it later.

Cooking the mushrooms apart. They are the "garnish", and should be distinctive, rather than part of the stew.

In his comment below, Elwyn suggests lifting the fat from the chilled stew the following day. That would be healthier, certainly; but it also involves discarding something very flavoursome. I am inclined to leave the fat, but to serve the stew with a plain accompaniment.

Boeuf Bourguignon

Boeuf Bourguignon is one of those dishes you assume to be sacrosanct. In Floyd on France (now out of print), Keith Floyd insists that you follow his Bourguignon recipe "with no deviation". But I think that home cooks can recognise that this is a provincial stew, permitting any number of adaptations. The essential point is that the beef is marinated in red wine (I used an inauthentic, but roughly appropriate, Costieres de Nimes), and then simmered in the marinade.

I simmered my stew on the hob, uncovered, allowing the sauce to evaporate and concentrate. The meat was not as tender as it might have been. A better method would have been the one I suggest below.

The pig's trotter, costing 50p, lifted the dish, giving it a rich, unctuous savouriness.

Serves about eight.

1.7kg chuck steak, cubed
1 bottle red wine (Burgundy or Rhone)
20 peppercorns
3 bay leaves
Several pinches of grated nutmeg
2 onions, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
50ml brandy
1 pig's trotter
4 more onions, sliced
150g butter
Salt
250g mushrooms, sliced
30g more butter

Marinate the beef, overnight if possible, in the wine with the peppercorns, bay, nutmeg, onions and garlic.

In a large, heavy casserole, melt the 150g butter and cook the (4 more) onions in it, over a low flame, until brown. This may take 45 minutes to an hour. Do not be tempted to hurry the process, because bits of onion will catch and burn if you do. Add more butter if necessary.

Drain the beef, reserving the marinade. Pick off the marinade ingredients that stick to the meat - this is a pain. Brown the meat in batches on a ridged grill pan, over a medium heat. The wine should help the surfaces to caramelise, and the browning should take not much more than a minute on each side. Transfer the meat as it is cooked to a plate, reserving the juices that come from it.

When you are finished with the meat, deglaze the pan with the brandy, scraping at the stuck bits. Reserve this liquid too. (I found that almost all of it evaporated.)

When the onions are brown, add the meat and its juices (and the deglazing liquid, if you have any) to the casserole. Put in the pig's trotter. Pour in enough of the strained marinade to come to a level with the top of the meat. You can put the bay leaves in there as well, and salt to taste.

Cook, covered, in a low oven, until the stew has simmered very gently for about two hours and the meat is tender. (You may find that you can have the oven as low as gas mark S/130C, although if you are in a hurry to get the stew simmering you may want to start at a higher temperature.)

When the stew is nearly ready, cook the mushrooms in butter, until the liquid they throw off has evaporated. Turn off the heat and cover the pan.

Remove the meat from the casserole, perhaps by tipping it into a colander over a saucepan. Return the meat and onions to the casserole, without the trotter (which has done its job); put the casserole back, covered again, into the low oven.

Boil the sauce to reduce it by about half. Stir it back into the meat, with the mushrooms.

This stew, you may have noticed, is rich. Plain rice is the ideal accompaniment.

Squash and couscous

A good many squashes will arrive in the vegetable box over the next few months. Although some recipes specify boiling, I almost always bake them - either in halves, and then scooping out the flesh for a soup; or peeled and cubed.

Peeling them is a pain. The skin is tough, and hard to peel away neatly. I cut the squash into quarters first. The flesh is quite tough too: it can take cubed, fork-sized pieces of squash 45 minutes to soften in a gas mark 5/180C oven.

I toss squash for stirring into couscous in oil - olive or sunflower - and a generous portion (about 2tsps) of cumin seeds. I like toasted pine kernels in there. The dish needs colour to relieve the beige: the other night, I added sun-dried tomatoes and raisins (which I had softened for 20 minutes in hot water), along with garlic fried in olive oil for a minute, and harissa.

Chicken with garlic and lemon

When I cook something that works well, I tend to go back to the recipe - or a version of it - shortly after. So this chicken with garlic and lemon is a version of the chicken and mushroom dish from last week.

4 chicken thighs
4 drumsticks
Salt
1dstsp butter
1dstsp olive oil (or vegetable, if you prefer)
150ml chicken stock
1 lemon, quartered
1 head garlic, separated into cloves
Sprig rosemary

In a casserole (if it can contain the chicken in one layer) or large saute pan, gently brown the chicken, salted, in the butter and oil.

Add the stock, lemon, garlic, and rosemary. Cover, and simmer over a low flame for 30 minutes. Uncover the pan, and allow the sauce to reduce until it is syrupy.