Greengage and blackberry fool

A very simple pudding. You use roughly the same quantity of cream as of fruit compote. The amount of sugar you need will vary according to the kind of fruit (or, in the case of rhubarb, vegetable). This fool includes about 20 greengages, two small punnets of blackberries, 2tbsps of caster sugar, 400ml of double cream, and 1tsp of vanilla essence.

Put about 50ml of water into a heavy saucepan, and throw in the greengages and blackberries with the sugar. Cover, bring to a simmer, and cook gently, stirring from time to time, until the fruit is very soft - no more than 15 minutes, probably. Force the compote through a sieve into another saucepan, pushing and stirring the fruit with a spoon.

Bring the sieved compote to a simmer again, and cook until it is lava-like in consistency, with big bubbles breaking the surface. Test for sweetness. Pour the compote into a bowl, and allow to cool. (It will thin the cream if it is hot.)

Whip the cream, with the vanilla if using, and stop as soon as it stiffens. (If you keep beating, it will become almost solid, and grainy too.)

Blend the cream and the compote, and chill for a couple of hours.

Lamb leg steaks

These are steaks, which you would fry or grill, but from the leg, which you would roast. So how to cook them? I chose a compromise.

The marinade includes a garlic clove, crushed with salt; the juice of half a lemon; and about three tbsps of olive oil. The steaks sat in it for only half an hour.

I got a ridged grill pan very hot, scraped excess marinade off the steaks, and seared them (one at a time) for only a minute each side, just long enough to give them a griddled appearance. I returned them to the marinade in the oven dish, and roasted them for 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C. Those who prefer their lamb to be less well done could allow at least 10 minutes fewer.

As you can see, they produced a fair amount of sauce.

Chocolate cheesecake

150g digestive biscuits
75g butter
3tsp gelatine*
500g ricotta or cottage cheese (drain the cottage cheese)
1 397g tin condensed milk (about 300ml)
200ml double cream, whipped until slightly thickened
100g dark chocolate

Rub a tiny bit of oil over a 20cm flan dish, or line and grease a 20cm springform cake tin (see here).

I whizzed the biscuits in a food processor, cut the butter into pieces, threw them in, and whizzed again until all the crumbs were buttery. But this base did not have the crunchiness I like. So my advice is to melt the butter in a saucepan over a very gentle heat, remove the pan from the heat, tip in the biscuit crumbs, and mix thoroughly with a spoon. Tip the crumbs into the dish or tin, and compact them with the back of a spoon. Put the dish or tin into the freezer to firm up.

Put about 4tbsp of cold water into a small saucepan. Sprinkle over the gelatine, and swirl the water about until the powder is thoroughly soaked. Set aside.

In a bowl, stir together the ricotta, condensed milk, and cream until thoroughly blended. (You may prefer to use 500ml cream alone, without the condensed milk. In which case, throw in 60g caster sugar too.)

Place a bowl in a saucepan of gently simmering water so that the base of the bowl does not touch the water. Break up the chocolate, throw it in, and stir until melted. Remove from the heat.

Add a few spoonfuls of the cheese and cream mixture to the chocolate - stirring them together will help to release the chocolate from the side of the bowl. Tip this mixture into the bowl of cheese and cream, and blend.

Put the saucepan with the gelatine on to the lowest possible flame, and stir. As soon as the powder dissolves and the mixture clarifies, remove it from the heat. (Boiling gelatine disables its setting qualities.) Keep stirring until thoroughly dissolved. Pour the gelatine into the cheese mixture, and blend thoroughly.

Remove the biscuit base from the freezer, and pour over the cheese mixture, levelling it with a knife. Cover the dish or tin with foil (create a tent above the filling if you're using a flan dish), and refrigerate for at least three hours.

This cheesecake is based loosely on one in CLASSIC CHEESE COOKERY by Peter Graham (Grub Street). Graham also includes 3 limes, creme de menthe, and mint leaves; his cheesecake contains a hefty 280g of chocolate. The disadvantage of my quantity is that the pale brown of the filling is not particularly attractive. But 280g would be a bit much, I think. You could leave out the chocolate altogether, and just have lime juice (and zest), or lemon, or a combination of the two. Three fruit in total, I think.

*Graham's recipe has 20g of gelatine, which is far more than I used, or needed, or would have needed even had I included the lime juice. Different gelatines (and particularly different leaf gelatines) have different strengths. Check the recommended quantities on the packet. If you use leaf gelatine (three leaves may be the equivalent of 3tsp), you can prepare it in the same way: soaking, and then warming very gently.

Chorizo and chick pea stew

New potatoes for 2
Olive oil
4 chorizos (the kind you cook, not the salami-type), skinned and cut into pieces
1 clove garlic, chopped
1tsp cumin seeds
2 medium red onions, sliced
2 red peppers, deseeded and cut into fork-sized pieces
1 tin chick peas, drained and rinsed
1tsp harissa, or cayenne pepper to taste

Scrape the potatoes. Cut them into even-sized chunks, put them into a pan of cold, salted water, bring to the boil, and simmer gently until tender.

While the potatoes are cooking, put a splash of oil into a heavy pan, and fry the chorizos over a gentle heat, until they release their own, paprika-hued oil. Throw in the garlic and cumin, and fry for a minute; throw in the onion, and cook for about five minutes, until slightly softened. (Add more oil if the slices threaten to catch. But you may not need it.) Tip in the peppers and chick peas, stir in the harissa or cayenne, cover, and cook gently.

When you have drained the potatoes, stir them into the stew. Continue to cook until the onions and peppers are soft.

This dish might also include tinned or whole, chopped tomatoes (to skin them, drop them into boiling water for 20 seconds, cool them under cold water, and peel off the skins), added with the peppers and chick peas. You may want to cook the stew uncovered, to thicken the tomato sauce.

You might also poach a couple of eggs with the stew - a common recipe in Middle Eastern cooking. I crack the eggs into a cup before tipping them, very gently, on to the surface of the simmering ingredients. They will cook in an uncovered pan, but I usually cover it, and give them about five minutes.

P.s. I've decided to switch to the verdana typeface. It is spacier than arial, and more readable, in my view.

A non-Victorian sponge

Most Victoria sponge recipes (this one, for example) instruct you to cream butter and sugar, mix in the eggs, and fold in the flour. An alternative way of making sponge cake is to blend the butter, sugar, and flour first, before almagamating the eggs. You give the flour more of a going over, developing more gluten, which helps to give the cake a coherent texture as it rises. In theory, a Victoria sponge will be lighter, because the flour is merely folded in to the other ingredients. But this version was not stodgy at all. I'm afraid that my effort collapsed slightly in the middle, in spite of the bizarre attempt I made to stabilise it (see below), probably because I took it out of the oven too soon.

These proportions are slightly different from those in the Victoria sponge recipe. But I did not use all the egg. If I had been making a sponge sandwich, I would have doubled the ingredients, dividing the batter between two tins.

100g self-raising flour (or plain flour, plus 1tsp baking powder)
100g caster sugar
100g softened butter
1tsp vanilla essence (optional)
2 eggs, beaten

Pre-heat your oven to gas mark 4/180C. Put in a baking sheet.

Place a 20cm springform cake tin on a piece of greaseproof paper, draw round it, and cut along the pencil mark. Smear a very small piece of butter on the base of the tin, stick the round piece of paper on top, and smear a little oil on the surface of the paper and round the sides of the tin.

In a food processor, blend the flour, sugar, and butter, in short pulses, until you have a stodgy mass. Tip the mixture into a bowl, and stir in the vanilla (if using) and a portion of the egg. Keep adding egg until you have a gloopy batter; it should drop off a spoon, but reluctantly. If you've used up all the egg before you get to this stage, add a little milk too.

Tip the batter into the cake tin, spread it out and level the surface, and put the tin on top of the baking sheet in the oven. Bake for about 25 minutes, or until an inserted skewer emerges clean.

Now the bizarre trick, recommended by Peter Barham in The Science of Cooking: drop the cake tin from a height of about 30cms on to a hard surface (I hope the spring is secure). The theory is this: as a cake cools, the air bubbles in it deflate, like collapsing balloons. Dropping the cake allows some of the bubbles to break, letting in air, which sustains the structure. It didn't work for me - but I'm pretty sure my mistake was complacently to neglect the skewer check.

Crackling perfection

A feature of this blog has been its obsessive revisiting of certain dishes - crackling, rice, cheesecakes - in a largely futile search for perfection. As the last crackling I made was perfect, I won't apologise for writing about it.

Frying was the answer. In my previous blog on the subject, I recommended grilling. But frying enables you to control the heat more easily, particularly because of the layer of fat in the pan.

I had braised slices of belly pork, for an hour and a half, in a broth flavoured with onion, juniper berries, and peppercorns. (The pork went into a salad.) At the end, I sliced off the rind, and let it dry.

I warmed just enough sunflower oil to give a thin layer in a heavy frying pan. On the lowest flame, I fried the pieces of rind, turning them frequently to prevent their burning. Until the water had vaporised, they crackled and bucked alarmingly. After about 15 minutes, they were crisp and golden; they shattered in the mouth like honeycomb.

Pasta with ricotta and spinach

A sauce made with ricotta left over from the cheesecake recipe. For 2.

250g spinach
1 clove garlic, crushed with a little salt
Small knob of butter
200g ricotta
150g double cream
200-250g pasta (depending on your appetite) - we had spirals
Salt

Wash the spinach, and discard any tough stalks. Lift it from the water, cram it into a saucepan, and cover. Put the saucepan over a high heat for a minute. Lift the lid; if the spinach is starting to wilt, stir it so that the leaves at the top hit the boiling liquid at the bottom of the pan. As soon as all the spinach is wilted, drain it. Either leave the spinach to cool and squeeze it dry with your hands, or do your best to push out the liquid with a wooden spoon. Chop up the leaves.

Bring a large pan of water to the boil, throw in a generous portion of salt, throw in the pasta, stir, and simmer at a generous bubble until al dente - just on the firm side of tenderness.

While the pasta is cooking, melt the butter in a saucepan over a low heat, add the garlic, and allow it to cook gently for a minute. Throw in the spinach, ricotta, and cream, stirring and mashing to blend the ingredients. Add salt to taste. Keep stirring over a low heat until warmed through.

Drain the pasta, and toss with the spinach and ricotta. The sauce is quite bland, even with the garlic: you may like to add a little cayenne, or quite a lot of black pepper. It occurs to me now that the sauce would have been enhanced by the grated rind of half a lemon.

Lemon mousse

This mousse is gorgeous. It has a delicious balance of citric acidity and sweetness, as well as a lovely, foamy texture. The trick - not one about which recipes are very helpful - is to blend the gelatinous mixture and the egg white at the right moment. Do it too soon, and the mixture separates and sinks; too late, and the mixture is too well set to be blended.

It is another recipe, following last week's cheesecake, from Reader's Digest's CLASSIC FAVOURITES. The RD version has an extra 125ml of cream, which you're supposed to pipe on top, as well as flaked almonds.

2tsp gelatine
2tbsp water
3 eggs, separated
150g caster sugar
2 lemons, juice and grated rind
125ml double cream

Put the gelatine and water into a small saucepan, and leave to soak for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, combine the egg yolks and sugar in a bowl, and beat them with a wooden spoon until they turn pale yellow. Beat in the lemon juice and rind.

Put the saucepan on to a ring on the hob at its lowest setting. The gelatine mixture may seem thick, but will quickly turn watery. Stir it until all the gelatine has dissolved, and do not allow the mixture to boil - overheating disables its thickening qualities. Add it to the egg and lemon mixture, stirring gently but thoroughly.

You leave this mixture until it starts to set. How long is this? RD does not say. I put mine in the fridge; after just over an hour, it still swirled around as I shifted the bowl, but was no longer runny. I decided that this was the moment. I turned out to be lucky.

Whisk the cream until it thickens, but stop before it becomes stiff – the transition is rapid, so take care. In a separate bowl, and with a separate – or at least clean – whisk, beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks (advice here).). Fold in to the whites the cream and the egg yolk mixture, which should have the consistency of a collapsing jelly. Again, perform the action gently, but do so until the mousse is thoroughly blended.

Spoon the mousse into a bowl, cover with cling film, and refrigerate for at least six hours.

New York cheesecake

I have an amazingly useful Reader's Digest book called CLASSIC FAVOURITES. I say "amazingly" because the book is where I go for every classic recipe, yet appears to be only a slim hardback, at 200 pages.

Finding the recipe and having the ingredients to hand are different matters. So I had to substitute certain ingredients in this New York cheesecake (which the book calls "American cheesecake"). I've marked the heretical ingredients with asterisks, and commented on the RD version below. My method is slightly different, too.

Crust
150g digestive biscuits
50g butter*

Filling
300g ricotta
200g cream cheese**
125g caster sugar
2 eggs, separated
125ml double cream***
2tbsp flour
1tsp vanilla essence
1tsp grated lemon rind (the rind from 1 lemon, roughly)

Blitz the biscuits in a food processor. Melt the butter in a saucepan over a very low heat, and mix in the digestive crumbs.

Spread a little butter on the base of a 24cm cake tin, and place a circle of greaseproof paper on top. (Draw a ring on the paper round the base, and cut along it.) Tip in the crumbs, spread them out, and compact them with the back of a spoon. Put the tin in the fridge for a couple of hours, RD says; I put mine in the freezer.

Blend the cheeses. Beat in the sugar and egg yolks. Stir in the cream (I whipped mine first, until it had started to thicken), flour, vanilla essence and lemon rind. Beat with a wooden spoon until the mixture is smooth. Whisk the egg whites until stiff but not dry (advice here), and fold them gently into the mixture. Pour the mixture on to the crust in the cake tin. Spread smooth.

Put the tin on to a baking sheet (an aid to even heat transmission, some books say), and bake in the centre of a gas mark 4/180C oven for one hour. My cheesecake took an hour and 10 minutes, by which time it was only very slightly wobbly in the centre.

Allow the cake to cool (the picture shows it still in its tin). Then chill it in the fridge. When it's properly chilled, release it from the tin.

The RD cheesecake has a very sweet topping, made from black cherries in syrup, cornflour, lemon juice, and caster sugar. Not my thing.

* RD suggests 200g digestives, so you have enough crumb to spread up the sides of the tin. I'd be likely to make a mess of that job. I've left out the 2tbsp of caster sugar that the book includes in the crumb mix. It suggests 100g butter; but I've come to think that a ratio of 1/3 butter to digestives works fine.

** The recipe has 250g cottage cheese and 250g cream cheese; or 500g cream cheese. Cottage cheese might give a lighter filling.

*** I was disappointed not to have sour cream. I would definitely use that (or creme fraiche) next time.

Victoria sponge

Geraldene Holt's CAKES, from Tom Jaine's Prospect Books, is a lovely book, its loveliness uncompromised by a lack of pictures. Many glossily produced works will fall into disuse while this handsome, authoritative, wide-ranging paperback endures as a kitchen bible.

Here is Holt's recipe for Victoria sponge.

175g butter, at room temperature
175g caster sugar
3 eggs
1/4tsp vanilla essence
175g self-raising flour

Cream the butter and sugar until the mixture is soft and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating them in well. Mix in the vanilla essence. Gradually fold in the flour, sifted. Divide the mixture between two 20cm cake tins, and smooth level.

Put the tins on to a baking sheet, and bake in a pre-heated oven at gas mark 4/180C for 30 minutes, or until the cakes are golden brown and just starting to shrink from the tins. Cool in the tins for 2 minutes; turn out to cool on a wire rack. Spread the filling of your choice on to one of the cakes, and make a sandwich.

Holt advises that you use the base of the tins to draw circles on greaseproof paper. You cut out the discs, butter the bases of the tins, and put the paper on top. You grease the sides of the tins with clarified butter - the solids in unclarified butter, she says, can cause cakes to stick. Not being bothered to prepare clarified butter, I used sunflower oil, spreading it on the tins with a paper towel.

I had one springform tin, and one receptacle made of some rubbery substance, and borrowed from a neighbour. The rubbery version worked fine.

I had no vanilla essence, being able to find only inferior vanilla flavouring (one bottle was sneakily labelled "vanilla flavouring essence") in the shops. I flavoured my sponge with the zest of a whole lemon.

I do not have an electric hand beater, which is supposed to ease the creaming process. I started off by crushing the ingredients with a spoon, and then had a go at them with an electric stick blender. It immediately got clogged, of course. But I think that it did help me to produce a lighter mixture.

Is it necessary to add the eggs gradually to the creamed butter and sugar? You're trying to prevent curdelling. But the flour will do that. I simply chucked in the eggs and the flour all at once. I got a sticky batter. Nigella Lawson (whose version in HOW TO EAT has 225g of butter, sugar and flour (of each of them, that is), with four eggs) says that you want a pouring consistency, and suggests that you add a little milk. But my cakes were spongy enough, I thought.

Lamb stew with aubergines and turnips

Ideally, one should add vegetables to a stew to give them just enough time in which to cook. Incorporating them at the start is a bad idea, because they will be overcooked before the meat is ready. But you cannot be confident of the optimum timing with the aubergines and turnips in this dish. One hour worked for me; but I needed to fiddle around with temperature settings, and to give the stew regular stirs, to ensure that the pot continued simmering and that the vegetables softened evenly.

(I know that carrots are a standard ingredient of many stews, but I don't like using them in this way. Overcooked, as they usually are, they lose all flavour. The exceptions are baby carrots cooked whole in a dish such as poule au pot or bollito misto.)

For 4

750g stewing lamb (I used pieces of middle neck)
Sunflower oil
Salt
2 red onions, roughly chopped
1 head garlic, separated into unpeeled cloves
1 bay leaf
200ml chicken stock
1 large aubergine, cubed
4 small turnips, peeled and sliced, or cut into chunks if you prefer

Coat the lamb in a little sunflower oil, salt it, and brown it quickly on a ridged grill pan (or in a heavy frying pan) over a high heat. Remove to a plate.

Put 2tbsps sunflower oil over a low to medium heat, and soften the onion for 10 minutes or so. Throw in the garlic cloves and bay leaf, and pour in the stock. Put the lamb pieces into the stew. You'll find that the liquid comes about half way up the meat; but after the pot has been in the oven for an hour or so, the meat will probably be submerged. Add more salt, if you like.

I put this dish into the oven for three and a half hours at gas mark S/130C. That setting will cause a stew in my Le Creuset pot to simmer gently. But your oven, and pot, may behave differently.

Stir in the aubergine and turnips with about an hour to go, and bring the stew to a simmering point before returning it to the oven. Turn up the dial temporarily to gas mark 6/200C, until the stew is simmering again - you may be surprised to find, if you have a heavy pot, that even at this setting the stew make take 20 minutes or longer to return to simmering point. Return to gas mark S. Check the ingredients at intervals, stirring them.

I served the stew, with its generous quantity of sauce, in bowls with couscous. So I might have spiced it (along the lines of this version), had there not been objectors to spicy food at the table. For myself, I mixed some of the sauce with harissa.

Chicken salad with yoghurt and pesto

I am not keen on the flavour of bottled pesto, finding it assertively sharp, with the dusty quality of dried herbs. But used in moderation, with other ingredients, it can offer some zing. New potatoes tossed with mayonnaise and no more than a tsp (for four people) of pesto are very nice. Or there's this simple chicken salad, a change from coronation chicken and much quicker to make.

For four people, I poached eight chicken thighs in water in a covered pan for 75 minutes. (I put onion and peppercorns in the poaching water, and kept it for stock.) I shredded the chicken, and allowed it to cool.

I mixed 1 heaped tbsp of Greek yoghurt, 1 heaped tbsp of (bottled) mayonnaise, 1 tsp of pesto, a clove of crushed garlic, some salt, and a squirt of lemon juice. I tossed the chicken in this mixture.

Split mayonnaise

The more experienced I become at making mayonnaise, the more often I mess it up. Complacency is fatal. You really do have to add the oil very gradually, and to make sure that it is properly amalgamated before adding the next drops, until you have used at least half of it. On my first attempts, I was so nervous about separating the mixture that I dripped in the oil with huge restraint and care. Now, I am tempted to think I can get away with splashing it in, and as soon as I do the stiffened mixture in the bowl collapses and turns runny.

These blunders can be repaired, however. Pour the runny mixture into a second bowl. Put another egg yolk into your original bowl, which can have some of the botched mayonnaise adhering to it. Now amalgamate the botched mayonnaise, bit by bit, with the yolk; then start adding oil again. My method is to continue the process until the mayonnaise is too thick to stir, thin it with a little lemon juice or vinegar, and resume pouring in the oil, allowing 150g of oil (mostly sunflower, with about 25g of extra virgin olive) for each yolk.

Mayonnaise recipe

Remarks on the Guardian's recipe

Almond cake

This is a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe from the Guardian (here - scroll down).

My springform cake tin leaks, so I used an ordinary one; it is 22cms, rather than the 25cms Fearnley-Whittingstall asks for. The cake came loose very easily. But what you see here is upside down.

Two observations. Whisking the sugar and egg mixture is quite hard work: the mixture is stiff. Perhaps in part because I used a more narrow tin but also because cakes always seem to take longer than recipes suggest they should, this cake took about 55 minutes to set.

It was good, and stayed moist for several days. I think that it would have been even nicer had I used the zest from 2 lemons.

Sausage casserole with new potatoes and onions

This dish was not entirely successful. I had intended it to be a version of a dish I make with new potatoes, onions, garlic, pancetta, and olive oil: I just mix them all up in a heavy casserole, and cook them at gas mark 6/200C for 30 minutes, and at 4/180C for a further 30 (stirring them up every so often). The onions keep the dish moist; the oil and the fat give it an unctuous quality.

I cooked the substantial quantity in the photo just for myself, with 4 new potatoes (medium-sized), 1 clove of chopped garlic, 2 roughly chopped onions, some salt, 2tbsps of olive oil, and the 3 sausages.

The challenge, I thought, was to brown the sausages without splitting them. I put them on a medium heat with the oil, and kept them moving all the time. They browned quickly. Then I tipped in the other ingredients, stirred everything around, and put the dish in the oven. As you can see, the sausages split anyway, while they were baking. But they didn't impart any flavour to the potatoes and onions. I might as well have fried them separately.

Basic mackerel pate

Not a gourmet recipe, but perfectly nice as a quick lunch.

2 cooked mackerel fillets, skinned and cut into pieces
2tbsp cream cheese
Juice of half a lemon
Cayenne pepper to taste

Whizz the ingredients in a food processor. For quantities such as these, I use the Moulinex in the picture rather than a full-size machine.

Rhubarb sponge

The forced rhubarb that you can still get at the moment is good for crumbles and sponges, because it is tender enough not to require pre-cooking. As you can see, it gives off quite a bit of liquid - but not too much.

The recipe is based on one in a kitchen favourite of mine (and of many others), Margaret Costa's Four Seasons Cookery Book.

450g rhubarb, washed and cut into pieces
55g soft brown sugar
55g butter
55g caster sugar
Rind of 1 orange
1 egg, beaten
85g plain flour

Place the rhubarb in an oven dish, and scatter the sugar on top.

Cream the butter with the caster sugar until soft and pale. Stir in the egg and the flour. (I used gluten-free flour, which gets particularly thick and sticky: I added the best part of a further egg.)

Spread the sponge mixture over the rhubarb. Bake at gas mark 5/190C for about 40 minutes, until the sponge has risen and browned.

Quick stir-fry

A Ripple Farm "stir-fry bag" came in my vegetable box this week. It contained broccoli, a few very thin leaks, and various leafy vegetables I could not identify.

Recipes tell you to heat the oil for stir-fries until it is smoking. Don't, unless you want to consume burnt oil. I put a Le Creuset casserole (I don't own a wok) on a medium heat for a few minutes, before pouring in a couple of tbsps sunflower oil. Immediately, I threw in the washed and drained greenery, and turned up the heat, stirring everything around rapidly until it wilted - no more than a couple of minutes. I stirred in a few shakes of soy sauce, divided the contents of the pan between two plates, and laid sliced goat's cheese on top. That was it.

Oven-baked stews

Certain stews, as I have mentioned before, require very little preparation. You do not need to start by browning the meat, or softening the onions, because the cooking process will perform those functions anyway.

The dish above has three chopped red onions, two red peppers deseeded and chopped into fork-size pieces, and two cloves of finely chopped garlic - all tossed in the dish with two tbsps of olive oil and some salt. The chicken thighs are coated in a little oil and placed on top. I baked the dish for 30 mins at gas mark 6/200C, after which I stirred the onions and peppers, turned the chicken, and lowered the heat to 4/180C. I gave the dish 90 minutes in total, stirring and turning once more after an hour.

Meat will also brown in a covered casserole, if it is not submerged in liquid. Yesterday, I cooked a couple of lamb shanks: three roughly chopped onions, a whole head of garlic separated into cloves, rosemary, bay, and salt, all tossed in a couple of tbsps of oil (sunflower this time). I coated the shanks in oil and laid them on top, with half a chicken stock cube. Gentle cooking: gas mark 2/150C for 90 minutes, until the stew was bubbling, then gas mark S/130C for another 120 minutes - again, I stirred the ingredients and turned the meat from time to time.

'Perfect' rice from the Guardian

I may as well just face it, and admit that I'll never come up with a 100% satisfactory and fool-proof method of cooking rice. Such a method may not exist: the 153 comments below Felicity Cloake's Guardian article on How to cook perfect long grain rice, many of them claiming also to be perfect but giving widely differing instructions, suggest its elusiveness. What of Cloake's "perfect" advice?

She suggests 450g basmati rice for four people. Wash it in a sieve under running water; soak it for 30 minutes; put it in a pan with 585ml water, and salt, on a medium heat; bring to a simmer, cover, and cook on a very low heat for 25 minutes. Place the pan on a wet tea towel, leave for a further five minutes, fluff up the rice, and serve.

I had three reservations about this recipe. The first is that the measurements are unhelpful, unless you want to cook precisely 450g of rice. What you need are proportions, or general guidelines, that work for various quantities. It turns out that 585ml of water is about 1.2 times the volume of the rice; perhaps the more important point is that it covers the rice in the pan with just a mm or two to spare. If you had not pre-soaked and softened the rice, you would need more water than this to cook it.

My second doubt concerns the cooking time. Twenty-five minutes? As many of the comments on the Guardian piece point out, the rice will be cooked in 10 at most. Are the extra 15 minutes required to separate the grains by steaming?

I followed the recipe to the letter. The rice was a little clumpy, but not nearly as clumpy as I had feared; and the grains separated nicely with the addition of sauce. But I think the result would have been better had I switched off the heat after 10 minutes.

Do you need - this is my third doubt - to soak the rice at all? The practice originates in places where rice is not as clean or as carefully sifted as the stuff we buy. Yes, soaking softens the grains; it also leeches nutrients. The only occasions on which I think it is necessary is when you cook the rice with other ingredients, in a pilau, for example. Then, you want to ensure that the rice will cook with just enough water to cover it. Otherwise, the bulk of the ingredients forces you to use too much water in order to ensure that the grains are submerged.

The closest I came to perfection recently was when I reheated rice. Every grain was separate. It explains why Indian restaurants' rice - reheated, for sure - is usually good. So maybe the ideal recipe involves cooking rice in your normal way, tipping it into a foil-lined colander above steaming water, wrapping up the foil, putting a lid on top, and allowing it to steam until you need it. But who can be bothered to do that?

Polenta cake revisited

My last polenta cake was a bit heavy on the polenta. Without cream or ice cream as an accompaniment, it was dry in the mouth. This one was gooier, and more readily digestible. Its shortcoming was that, once upended from the tin, it fell to bits. My mistake, I think, was failing to allow it properly to cool first.

225g butter
225g caster sugar
3 eggs
200g ground almonds
125g quick-cook polenta
1tsp baking powder
1tsp vanilla essence
2 lemons - zest and juice

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs. Recipes often tell you to add them one at a time; but you're unlikely to get a smooth mixture whatever you do, and the dry ingredients will stabilise it anyway.

Stir in the almonds, polenta, baking powder, vanilla, and lemon.

Pour the batter into a 20cm cake tin (a springform one if you like), and cook it at gas mark 3/160C for about 40 minutes. That timing comes from a majority of recipes rather than from my own experience, which suggests that the cake may take up to an hour to set.

Key lime pie 2

A return to a favourite theme of this blog: the creamy pie with a biscuit base. (See here, here, and here.) This one is adapted from a recipe in Nigella Lawson's KITCHEN. Hers has twice as many (ordinary) digestives, with 50g chocolate chips. You'd be able to use a better class of chocolate that way than you'd get from my chocolate digestives.

Nigella uses only 50g of butter to 300g of biscuits, while I have always believed that a higher ratio of butter gives you a firmer base. And she whizzes up the butter with the biscuits and chocolate: I had never thought of doing that, always stirring the crumbs into butter melted in a pan. The drawback of her method is that the mixture resolves itself into a ball in the food processor, rather as flour and fat do when you add a little water. It is a bit of an effort to spread it out in the dish.

150g chocolate digestives (I used gluten-free)
1tsp cocoa powder
75g unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 397g can condensed milk
3 limes, juiced and zested
284ml double cream

Whizz the biscuits with the cocoa powder and butter in a food processor.

Grease a 20cm flan dish or a springform tin. Tip in the biscuit mixture, spread it out, compact it with the back of a spoon, and put the dish or tin into the freezer for 30 minutes, to firm up the crumbs.

Pour the condensed milk into a bowl. Stir in the lime juice and zest, and pour in the cream. Whisk. With a hand whisk, this is quite hard work. The mixture does not go stiff, but it does, eventually, thicken. Pour this filling on top of the biscuit base.

Cover the dish with foil, tented at the top so that it does not stick to the filling, and refrigerate for at least three hours, or overnight.

This pie has an ideal combination of crunchy base and creamy, but light and tangy, filling.

A kind of hash

An ideal hash would contain plenty of crusted bits. You need a good pan, though, or else the mixture will stick and burn. I played it safe with this version, gently warming through the bacon, cabbage and potatoes. It was still good, though, thanks particularly to the bacon fat. 

Serves 3 (obviously, the contents are adjustable).

3 large potatoes
1 cabbage, tough outer leaves removed, quartered, core removed, chopped (you may think you have a lot of cabbage, but you'll find that it cooks down)
9 slices streaky bacon (I used unsmoked), chopped into fork-sized pieces
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 red onions, chopped

Peel the potatoes, and cut them into pieces. (I usually cut a large potato into three crossways, and cut each of these sections into three or four pieces.) Put them into a pan of lightly salted water, bring to the boil, and simmer gently until soft. Drain.

Cram the cabbage into a saucepan with a little water. Cover, put the pan over a medium heat, and cook for about five minutes, or until the leaves are wilted, stirring from time to time. Drain.

In a heavy casserole or frying pan, fry the bacon pieces gently in a little olive or sunflower oil (they will exude their own fat) until they brown and crisp. (If you use cheap bacon, it will throw off a lot of water. Turn up the heat until this liquid evaporates.) Throw in the garlic and let it fry and soften for 20 seconds or so; now throw in the onions, and fry for five to 10 minutes, by which time they should be soft.

Throw in the potatoes and cabbage, with salt and pepper to taste. Stir everything around as it warms through - there's no harm in breaking up the potatoes. If you're confident in your pan, you could turn up the heat slightly, allow the base of the mixture to brown, and then stir everything up and repeat the process, until you have a kind of green and purple-flecked, crispy mash.

Grilled bacon

I've come to prefer to cook bacon in the bottom of a grill pan lined with foil. Pour in about a dstsp of oil (I use sunflower, mostly), and smear the bacon in it - the oil is both a conductor of heat and a protector from the flame. Set the grill to low, and turn the bacon when you start to hear it sizzling. Thereafter, and particularly if your grill is as hot as mine is, you need to turn the rashers with increasing frequency, because otherwise the rinds will burn. I usually cook them until they're crispy.

Baked chicken curry

Another recipe adapted from Madhur Jaffrey's CURRY EASY. The chief difference from her version is that I did not marinate the chicken overnight.

4 chicken thighs
Salt, pepper
2tbsp lime juice (you can see the lime hulls in the dish, above)
1tsp coriander seeds
1tsp cumin seeds
3 heaped tbsp thick yoghurt
1tsp finely grated ginger
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/2tsp ground turmeric
1/4tsp cayenne pepper (or more, according to taste)
4 cardamom pods
1 onion, finely chopped
1tbsp sunflower or olive oil

In an oven dish, toss the chicken pieces in the salt, pepper and lime juice.

Heat the cumin and coriander seeds in a dry pan over a gentle heat until toasted. Crush in a mortar, or whizz them in a grinder. Mix them with the yoghurt, ginger, garlic, turmeric, cayenne and cardamom. Toss the chicken in this mixture. Scatter the onions on top, and sprinkle the dish with oil.

Bake at gas mark 6/200C, checking that the onions do not burn, for 30 minutes. Turn over the chicken pieces, and return the dish to the oven for a further 40 minutes, basting from time to time, and turning down the heat if the sauce is bubbling too vigorously. The splitting of the yoghurt does not matter, because the sauce evaporates and thickens.

Stewed belly pork - and crackling

Poaching or stewing belly pork does not mean that you cannot crackle the skin. On the contrary, it may help, because it will break down the collagen, which is what causes rubberiness. The crackling above comes from slices of belly pork, simmered in a stew with beans.

About 30 minutes from the end of cooking, lift the pork from the stew, and slice off the rind. Return the pork to the pot.

Line a grill pan with foil, and pour on to it about a tbsp of oil. Pat dry the pork rinds (which will be sticky). Toss them in the oil in the pan, and arrange skin-side up. Grill them at full setting at first, but turn down the heat as soon as they start to make crackling noises. The danger is, if you keep them too close to a high flame, that they will burn before turning crisp. I move the pan down to the floor of the grill.

The process will probably take about 15 to 20 minutes.

Spiced rice, reheated

The cooked rice above is sitting in foil in a colander. I parcelled up the foil, rested the colander on the lips of a pan above vigorously simmering water, and put a lid on top. I gave it 10 minutes. (Inadequately reheated rice can be dangerous.)

The yellow rice is another recipe from Madhur Jaffrey's terrific CURRY EASY. Adaptation, for 4, below.

300g basmati rice
2tbsp olive or sunflower oil
1 whole dried red chilli (I think she means ones of normal size. Mine, which are fiery, are minuscule. I used a couple)
1tsp skinned urad dal or yellow split peas (I used red lentils. But I'm not sure what the point of them is - perhaps it's to add colour, along with the turmeric)
1tsp mustard seeds
1tbsp sesame seeds
1/2tsp turmeric
1tsp salt (optional)

Put the rice in a bowl. Cover with cold water and stir gently. Pour out the dirty water. (I do so carefully and slowly, in an effort to leave all the rice behind. Draining the rice in a sieve, then trying to return it to the bowl when a good deal of it sticks to the mesh, is a pain.) Repeat the process four or five times. Leave to soak for 30 minutes. Drain.

(What is it that turns the rice water so murky? Starch? Or less pleasant stuff?)

Warm the oil, in a heavy pan, over a medium heat. Throw in the chilli, dal (if using), mustard seeds, and sesame seeds. When you hear the mustard seeds popping, add the drained rice, turmeric, and salt (again, if using).

Pour over enough water to cover the rice by about 0.5cms. Bring to the boil, and simmer until the water level sinks beneath the surface of the rice. Cover, and turn the heat right down. (I put a heat disperser under the pan.) Give the rice 10 minutes' cooking time in total. After you've turned off the heat, you can leave the rice to rest until you need it.

Madhur Jaffrey tells you to steam the rice for 25 minutes. Lots of cookbooks give similar timings, but in my experience most brands of basmati rice are ready much more quickly than that. I suppose that the extra steaming might help to separate the grains, but I find that long cooking simply causes them to clump together.

Spiced black bean soup

Madhur Jaffrey's CURRY EASY was worthy of the Sunday Times' Cookery Book of the Year accolade (though the claims of Niki Segnit's THE FLAVOUR THESAURUS were strong). I find, as I browse most cookery books, that I come across at most half a dozen recipes I might cook; I want to try just about everything in Jaffrey's, even if, as here, I adapt them.

2tbsp sunflower or vegetable (or olive, Jaffrey says) oil
1 clove garlic, chopped
Generous pinch ground asafoetida
1/4tsp cumin seeds
2 red onions
1/4tsp cayenne pepper
1/4tsp turmeric
1 can organic black beans
Lemon juice

Warm the oil over a medium heat, and throw in the garlic, asafeotida, and cumin. When they're sizzling, add the onions, and stir until soft, lowering the heat if they threaten to catch. Add the cayenne and turmeric, and pour in the beans with their liquid. (If the beans are not organic, you may prefer to throw away the salty, slimy water in which they have been sitting, and to use fresh water instead.) Add more water to come to the top of the beans and to create a soup of the consistency you like. Here, I must admit that I added half a chicken stock cube too.

Bring to a simmer, lower the heat, cover the pan, and simmer for 10 minutes. Blend. (I use a stick blender.) Squirt in a little lemon juice. If you have not used a cube, you may want some salt.

Chocolate mousse, without graininess

This was the best chocolate mousse I have ever made: richly frothy in texture, and without the graininess that has marred my efforts in the past. I think the key was that the chocolate mixture was properly cool before I added the egg yolks.

The ingredients produced enough mousse to fill seven ramekins.

150g dark chocolate (I used Green & Black's cook's chocolate)
25g butter, cut into small cubes
6 eggs, separated

Break the chocolate into its squares, and melt it in a bowl held above a pan of simmering water. (I have a Pyrex bowl that rests on the edges of a saucepan.) Stir the chocolate to encourage melting, and remove it from the heat as soon as, or slightly before, all the lumps have disappeared. Drop in the butter.

Beat the egg whites, just on their own and with no salt or acid (see this post), until they form soft peaks. Take about a quarter of the white and beat it into the chocolate and butter. The mixture should retain the texture and consistency of thick chocolate sauce. Now stir in the yolks.

Pour the chocolate mixture over the egg whites. Fold it in, using a lifting and turning motion with the spoon until amalgamated. Transfer to a dish, or to individual ramekins, and refrigerate for at least three hours.

Bolognese, lentils, and rice

What to cook when you're going out for Christmas drinks with neighbours, and will be back after 8pm, with several glasses of mulled wine inside you and with no enthusiasm for work in the kitchen? A one-pot meal, which you can leave in the oven on a low heat.

The dish above (for 2) consists of a Bolognese sauce (made with 150g of beef mince and 150g of pork mince), Puy-type lentils, and arborio rice. I boiled the lentils (100g) for 10 minutes, then threw in the rice (175g) and allowed the pan to boil for a further 10 minutes. The idea was to leave the lentils and rice slightly undercooked.

I drained them, stirred them into the Bolognese in the casserole, and covered the mixture tightly with kitchen paper (to enhance the effect of the steam in the pot) before putting on the lid. I put the dish in a low oven - I won't give a setting, because my thermostat is not working properly - as we went out; we ate it when we arrived home, two hours later.

(The Bolognese sauce was similar to the mince stew in this cottage pie, only with tomato puree instead of the ketchup.)

Red cabbage, beans, and cream cheese

I prefer to eat red cabbage raw than cooked. To my taste buds, it - like all brassicas - goes past its best when boiled or steamed for longer than about five minutes. However, the raw cabbage needs partners with contrasting textures, or it simply offers mouthful after mouthful of dull chewiness.

1dstp white wine vinegar
Salt, peppper
1/3tsp honey
1/3tsp Dijon mustard
2dstsp sunflower oil
1dstsp olive oil
150g cream cheese
1 tin cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
1/4 of a large red cabbage, shredded

Put the vinegar in a large bowl, add the salt (to taste), pepper (ditto), honey and mustard, and stir until the salt, honey and mustard dissolve. Whisk in the oils. Mash in the cheese, so that it softens.

Stir in the beans and cabbage until the lumps of cheese break up and coat everything.

Oven settings

My oven thermostat is on the blink. When I set the dial to gas mark 6 (200C), a thermometer told me that the temperature was in fact 150C. So I cooked this chicken (a 2kg, free range one from Sutton Hoo) at full blast, for 30 minutes, before turning down the dial to 6, and cooking for a further 90 minutes.

It made me think that I usually set the dial according to received advice rather than to how the cooking process is developing. Better to cook the chicken this way, by monitoring its progress and adjusting the dial accordingly. Still, I'd prefer to have a properly working oven.

The wing tips are missing because I cut them off to use, with the neck, in a stock for gravy.

Potato, cheese, and red onions

Aligot, or cheesy potato, or whatever you want to call it, can be more interesting with the addition of onion. I add one red onion per person, sliced finely, to the ingredients in this recipe. I sweat the onion in the butter, on a low heat and in a covered pan. To prevent it from catching, I sometimes use a little oil as well, and I check it quite often, because covering the pan can cause the onion to cook too furiously. Once it has softened and turned glossy, I usually remove the lid, allowing about 20 minutes cooking time in total.

Otherwise, I follow the previous recipe, stirring the buttery onions into the mash with the cheese.

Risotto balls

These fried balls are made with left-over risotto. I rolled the risotto (squash, kale and onion) into balls in my palms; then I dipped the balls in egg, and rolled them in flour. I fried them gently in sunflower oil for about 10 minutes, turning once.

They were delicious, with the crisp surfaces complementing that sticky, rich interiors.

Gluten-free batter

I am not sure whether one can make a satisfactory batter with gluten-free flour. The batter in the picture consists of 150g of Doves self-raising gluten free flour, 400ml milk and water combined (half and half), and two eggs. As you can see, it is disconcertingly pale. It is also, like the pancakes I once made to the same recipe, rather doughy in texture - not unpleasant, but not quite what one aims for.

The Yorkshire pudding recipe on the Doves website includes, as well as the gluten-free flour, cornflour and xanthan gum (a stabiliser and emulsifier). I imagine that it would produce a still more doughy result - but I won't know until I try.

Gluten-free cresponlini

Lighter batter

Orange polenta cake

I have been meaning for some time to try making a gluten-free cake for my gluten-intolerant wife. This is a slight adaptation of a recipe I found on the Cake Baker website - which, unusually these days, gives measurements in ounces.

200g butter
200g caster sugar
3 eggs
100g ground almonds
200g instant polenta
1 orange, zest and juice

Cream the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs. Fold in the almonds, polenta, and lemon juice. You should have a stiff batter.

I cannot give very helpful advice about oven temperatures. The recipe advises you use an eight-inch (20cm) cake tin, whereas the one in the picture has a base of 15.5cms. That was one reason why my cake took a lot longer to set than the 20-25 minutes specified; another may be that my oven is behaving a bit strangely, often failing to reach the temperature on the dial.

I started cooking the cake at gas mark 5/190C (but at what may have been a good deal cooler than that). After half an hour, the centre was runny. I turned up the dial to 6/200C. Fifteen minutes later, I moved the cake to a higher shelf. It took an hour in total.

You need cream or ice cream as an accompaniment, to offset the dry graininess of the polenta.

Or perhaps this Telegraph version, with less polenta but more ground almonds, is worth trying. Like many polenta cake recipes, it includes baking powder - which usually contains gluten. I don't think my cake suffered from the lack of it.

Floury potato cakes

A potato cake is a kind of pancake with mashed potato as an extra ingredient. A floury taste is fine in pancakes or batters; but I'm not sure it's welcome here, when your taste buds, registering the potato, miss the buttery smoothness of true mash. (I wrote about flourless potato cakes here.)

Still, I may get used to them.

450g mashed potato
4tbsp plain flour
1 egg, beaten
Sunflower oil, for frying

Mix the potato, flour and egg, and form into small patties. They will be very squidgy. You will have to handle them gently, and plop them on to a plate, or half of each will stick to your hands. But you do not need to worry about the consistency, because they will firm up and form a crust when fried.

Warm a thin layer of oil in a heavy pan, over a low heat. Drop in the cakes, and fry them gently, turning once. They brown quite readily, in my experience, so keep an eye on them.

Plum crumble

You do not need to pre-cook the plums in a plum crumble. Sprinkling them with sugar about an hour before you add the topping will help to soften them; and you could cook them in the oven for longer, at a lower heat, than you would a crumble with pre-cooked fruit. The plums I used were similar to Victorias, but larger.

Two of us ate the crumble in the picture. It would have served three.

12 plums, halved and stoned (not a job that you can carry out with precision - I used a small knife to work round the stone and prise it out)
2tsp caster sugar
75g plain flour
40g unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1tbsp brown sugar
 
Lay the plums snugly in an oven dish, cut sides up. Sprinkle them with sugar, and set aside for a while.

Work the butter into the flour with your finger tips. (It's not worth getting out a food processor for this job. You can do it very quickly by hand, because you don't have to keep rubbing until every bit of butter has disappeared.) Stir in the sugar.

Tip the crumble mixture over the plums, and bake at gas mark 4/180C for about 40 minutes.

Guinea fowl stew, with shallots and pancetta

The guinea fowl may not have been free range, I am afraid. The price - £7.20 for a bird of about 1.6kg - does not suggest luxurious rearing conditions. But it was flavoursome.

As is the case with chickens, you should cook the breasts for only 30 minutes or so, to keep them tender.

1 guinea fowl, in four pieces
Salt
Knob of butter, tbsp of sunflower oil
450g shallots, peeled
4 cloves garlic - 2 chopped, 2 left whole
80g smoked pancetta, cubed
50ml balsamic vinegar
80ml chicken stock

Warm the butter and oil in a heavy casserole, and gently fry the guinea fowl pieces, salted. You may need to do this in two batches of two. Keep the heat low; you don't want the fat to burn. When browned, transfer to a plate.

Throw in the shallots, garlic, and pancetta. Cook for a minute or so to allow the garlic to soften. Pour in the vinegar, and let it bubble and reduce for a minute. Pour in the stock. Return the guinea fowl legs, but not the breasts, to the casserole, cover, and transfer to an oven. (I might have added some bay, or perhaps thyme or rosemary.)

The oven setting will depend on the heaviness of your casserole. The Le Creuset pictured above will simmer stews quite gently on gas mark 4/180C, whereas my smaller, round Le Creuset, once heated up, will perform efficiently at gas mark S/130C.

I like to cook forgiving cuts of meat until the meat is falling off the bone. I gave the legs 90 minutes before adding the breasts, and giving them another 30 minutes.

There was plenty of sauce. But stews can dry out in certain dishes or atmospheric conditions. Add more stock or water if necessary.

Egg whites

I added a tiny bit of vinegar and some salt to these egg whites before I beat them, as the books advise (or you could use lemon juice, they suggest). But it occurred to me, as I beat away to no great effect, that my discovery about the influence of salt and vinegar on poached eggs (see entry and comments here) - that they soften the whites - holds good in this case too. As you can see, I managed to raise some soft peaks eventually; but the foam was not as firm as it would have been without any additions.

As you can see below, the souffle worked anyway. (Well, maybe it was a little toasted on top.) I've commented before that I seem to have luck with souffles; and this was another that worked in spite of the imprecision of my measurements.

Here is a previous recipe. This one consisted of four separated eggs and a bechamel made with: enough butter to form a sandy roux with a heaped tbsp of (gluten-free) flour; a third of a pint of milk; about 80g of Grana cheese; a few scrapings of nutmeg; and a third of a tsp of Dijon mustard. Thirty minutes at gas mark 6/200C. Enough for two greedy people; might have served three.

A sort of panzanella

In a restaurant review at the weekend, John Lanchester mentioned that panzanella was a dish he liked more in theory than when he actually ate it. The problem is that soggy bread is not appealing; and if you try not to drench bread such as the stale baguette I used above, you might get a salad with very chewy, dry lumps.

This is of course a cobbled-together dish, the infinite variations on which might have only the bread and the vinaigrette as common ingredients.

Hunk of baguette, torn into pieces
Half a pack of feta, cubed
2 tomatoes, cut into fork-sized pieces
1dstsp black olive paste
1dstsp wine vinegar
1/6tsp honey
1/3tsp Dijon mustard
Salt, pepper
2dstsp sunflower oil
1dstsp olive oil

Sprinkle the bread with water, and allow the pieces to soak while you make the vinaigrette and cut up the tomatoes and feta.

Stir the honey, mustard, salt and pepper in the vinegar until dissolved. Add the oils, and whisk until you get an emulsion. Gently fold in the bread and other ingredients, and leave to stand for 20 to 30 minutes, to allow the sauce properly to infuse the bread.

Lamb chops with garlic and lemon, and roast potatoes

The lamb chops we ate this weekend were the most delicious I have tasted in a while, with a gamey depth of flavour that they do not have in the spring.

My favourite method is to marinate them, brown them for a minute or less on each side on a pre-heated grill pan on a high flame, and roast them for 10 to 15 minutes. The oven heats them through without charring their surfaces; and it offers the second advantage of enabling you to cook the chops in their marinade.

I used new potatoes, peeled, sliced about the thickness of pound coins, put into cold water, rinsed, and patted dry. I have discovered that salting them as you toss them in oil in the roasting tin helps them to crisp (because the salt sucks the moisture out of them) and therefore causes them to be less sticky. Even so, I line the roasting tin with foil.

Prepare the potatoes as above, and toss them thoroughly in a roasting tin in a good glug or two of oil (I used sunflower) and enough salt to be distributed among them all. Roast them for 60 minutes at gas mark 6/200C, turning them half way through. If you have an efficient non-stick surface, turning them will be straightforward, though fiddly; if, like me, you do not, you may need gently to prise them loose.

For three chops, I crushed a clove of garlic with a little salt, and stirred in the juice of half a lemon and a tbsp of olive oil. I poured this marinade over the chops, turned them in it a few times, and left them, covered, for a couple of hours. I heated the grill pan for five minutes, browned them quickly (with the marinade scraped off) as outlined above, and put them into the roasting tin with the potatoes, pouring the marinade over the top.

Beetroot in foil

I have written (here) that beetroot baked in a bath of water and covered seems to be moister and sweeter than when it is cooked dry, in foil. But I read again recently that the latter method produces the sweetest results of any. So I tried both again, with beetroot from the same source.

The beetroot above was cooked for an hour, at gas mark 6/200C. My impression was that it was slightly drier than the beetroot I cooked in a little water the day before, but that there was no discernible difference in sweetness. As the foil method is easy and involves no washing up, I may switch to it.

Omelette in a small pan

When writers state the utensils we need for a recipe, we use whatever we have that most closely follows the specification. But it is an obvious point that the equipment will have a big influence on the quality of the dish.

Take this six-egg cheese omelette - a frittata I suppose you'd call it, because of its size, and the slow cooking. I made it in a 20cm pan. That seems much too small. But I liked the cake-like texture; and, strangely, the base of the omelette was not overcooked, despite the lengthier cooking time that the small pan required.

It helps if the pan has an effective non-stick surface. You can stir the eggs for a while, rather as if you're scrambling them, before allowing the omelette to set.

I used 80g of Cheddar cheese, grated.

Lightly beat the eggs. Add salt.

Melt a knob (large walnut-sized) of butter in the frying pan, over a low heat. Pour in the eggs. Stir them around from time to time, until they are starting to set properly.

When about two thirds of the egg is set, but the omelette is still runny on the surface, scatter over the cheese. Place the pan on the rack below your overhead grill, set at its lowest. Remove as soon as the omelette starts to look solid - the fierce heat of the grill can easily overcook it.

Mayonnaise with cold eggs

I've just got back from France, where I had only limited internet access. It was refreshing.

One thing I learned was that I could get away with breaking an apparently important rule when making mayonnaise (previous entries here and here). All the ingredients for the sauce, Harold McGee says, should be at room temperature. But a batch of my mayonnaise went wrong; and I had to make do with a couple of eggs from the fridge. They did the job fine.

The problem, when I mess up mayonnaise, is not that I split the sauce, but that I produce a runny yellow liquid. I amalgamate the oil with the egg yolk, but don't allow it to thicken too before adding the next drops. Once you've made that mistake, you cannot get the mixture to thicken no matter how vigorously you beat it.

Lamb and aubergine stew

The latest in Grub Street's hardback reissues of Elizabeth David's works - as long as you don't mind weights in pounds and ounces, they are lovely editions to have - is Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen. The following is based on one of David's recipes. Of course, to insist that cumin isn't English is a bit like claiming that tomatoes aren't Italian.

Serves 4

750g stewing lamb (I used pieces of middle neck)
Sunflower oil
Salt
2 medium aubergines, cut into largish cubes
2 onions, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
2tsp cumin, toasted gently in a small saucepan, then crushed in a mortar
2 lemon husks (optional)
1/2 stock cube (optional)
2tbsp olive oil

Coat the lamb in a little sunflower oil, salt it, and brown it quickly on a ridged grill pan over a high heat. Remove to a plate.

Put the aubergines, onions, garlic, cumin, and lemon and stock cube if wanted, in a heavy casserole. (I had used the juice of the lemon to make some hummus at lunchtime; and I think that stock cubes, though often frowned upon, add savouriness to dishes.) Toss everything in the olive oil.

The onions and aubergines will stew, and don't need frying first, unless you think that this dish will benefit from the flavour of browned onions.

Tip in the lamb and any juice it has exuded. If you have used half a stock cube, be careful how much extra salt you add.

Cover, and put in the oven at gas mark 4/180C. If you have a heavy pan, the stew may take a good 45 minutes to get simmering. Once there is activity, you can turn down the heat - perhaps to as low as gas mark S/130C. You may want to give the stew another 90 minutes from that point. Stir it from time to time.

Cannellini bean dip

This is hummus, only made with cannellini beans. You need the lemon, cayenne/harissa, and black pepper, or it will be bland and sludgy.

1 tin cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
1 clove garlic, crushed with a little salt
3dstsp tahini paste
Juice of 1 lemon
1tbsp plain yoghurt
Several pinches of cayenne pepper, or 1/4tsp harissa
Black pepper
1 1/2tbsp olive oil

Put all the ingredients except the oil in a food processor, and whizz. (You may not need more salt, because the beans have been preserved in briny liquid.)

Stir in the olive oil. In my view (as also stated in the entry on mayonnaise), the flavour of oil is damaged by the whizzing blade of a food processor.