Basic fish stew

You don't have to include all the trimmings - pastis, orange zest, stock, saffron - to make an acceptable fish stew for supper. A straightforward tomato sauce, along the lines of the one in a chicken Basquaise, will do. I have to admit that the fish I used was (no doubt unsustainable) haddock from my local Tesco. For 2. (Here is a more elaborate recipe.)

1 onion, sliced
1 clove garlic, chopped
2tbsp olive oil
2 red peppers, deseeded and cut into fork-sized pieces
1 tin tomatoes
2 fish fillets, cut into fork-sized pieces
Salt

In a wide saute pan, soften the onion and garlic over a low to medium heat for about five minutes, until the onion starts to turn golden. (Add more oil if it threatens to catch.) Throw in the peppers, and cook for a further five minutes. Tip in the tomatoes, and simmer for about 20 minutes, until the sauce thickens. Add salt to taste.

Add the fish to the stew. It will take no more than a few minutes to cook.

Flat-leaf parsley would be a nice garnish. I stirred a tsp of harissa into my portion.

Chicken with cream, mustard and mushrooms

I made this for three people, with three thighs and three drumsticks. My oval Le Creuset just accommodated them in one layer. For the quantity below, you probably need a 28cm saute pan, with a lid.

4 chicken thighs
4 drumsticks
Salt
1dstsp butter
1dstsp olive oil (or vegetable, if you prefer)
70ml water
Half a chicken stock cube (optional)
More butter
150g button mushrooms, sliced
1 clove garlic, chopped
150ml double cream
1tsp Dijon mustard

Fry the chicken, salted, gently in the oil and butter. You may need less fat than I have suggested, because the chicken exudes its own. The oil helps to prevent the butter from burning.

When the thighs and drumsticks are golden (after about 15 to 20 minutes), pour in the water, and the half stock cube if using. (Some people don't like the taste of cubes; I think that, used cautiously, they add savouriness. Of course, proper stock would be better.) Cover the pan, and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, fry the mushrooms and the garlic, with a little more salt, in the butter (I'd use about 25g) over a low to medium heat. If they exude a lot of liquid, turn up the heat to evaporate it. I usually judge them to be ready when the liquid has gone. Turn off the heat, and cover the pan.

Uncover the chicken. You may find that there is now quite a lot of liquid. Continue to simmer, gently, until the liquid is syrupy.

Pour in the cream and add the mustard, and allow the sauce to bubble and thicken for a minute or two. When you have the consistency you like, stir in the mushrooms, allowing them to warm through if necessary. Particularly if you have used a cube, you should not need more salt.

Where Jamie and Hugh cut little ice

I have been a bit busy recently, helping set up a new website called BookBrunch, so I just have time today to make an observation. My local Tesco Express, on Seven Sisters Road, experimented for a while with stocking some organic chicken and pork. But I haven't seen these items there for a while. Now the Lidl up the road is advertising free range chicken; it will be interesting to see whether that lasts. In some areas, and during a credit crunch, the influence of Jamie and Hugh is weak.

Improvised lemon cake

Is it possible to make a cake as I make most of the savoury dishes on this blog: by assembling ingredients according to general principles rather than precise recipes? That is what I asked myself yesterday, when I fancied making a lemon cake (sometimes one gets these particular urges), but could find only recipes that were more complicated than appealed, and that involved ingredients I did not have.

Butter, sugar, eggs, flour: these are the basic ingredients. So: I creamed 50g of butter and 50g of golden caster sugar. I beat in three eggs, and added the zest and juice of a lemon, as well as a tsp of vanilla essence. I have noticed that some lemon cake recipes include cornflour, so I added a few dstsps of that. Then I added self-raising flour, dstsp by dstsp, until I arrived at that gloopy, "dropping" consistency. I poured the mixture into a buttered loaf tin, and baked it for half an hour.

It wasn't bad. It had risen in the centre, and cracked; and the consistency was somewhat dense, though not unpleasantly so. Perhaps I should have separated the eggs, beat the whites, and folded them into the mixture. Or perhaps a spot of baking powder would have helped. The cake was not moist and sticky, as the best ones are (thanks often to lemon curd, I believe).

If things are not right with savoury dishes, I usually know why. But I don't understand baking nearly as well.

(Tinned) tuna salad

I make many variations on this Delia-type (the Delia of How To Cheat at Cooking, I mean) salad, as an easy lunch for 4. It might include rice, artichoke hearts, lettuce - any number of ingredients.

2 tins tuna (in spring water, or brine)
1 tin butter beans, drained and rinsed
20 black olives, stoned (I like Crespo "Greek-style")
12 cherry tomatoes, halved
12 sun-dried tomatoes, each cut into 3
1tbsp mayonnaise
Salt (you won't need much), pepper

Mix the ingredients. That's it. If the sun-dried tomatoes come in oil, and you include it in the salad, so much the better.

Pepper, tomatoes and chick peas

My wife has developed a mild intolerance to gluten. I don't share it; but it has made me more aware that wheat products can sit heavily on the stomach. Coming home late, one is tempted to cook a quick and simple pasta dish, ending up with a slightly bloated feeling. Now, I usually have rice instead, probably with a more substantial sauce than I would serve with, say, spaghetti.

This is what I made for myself last night.

1 clove garlic, chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
I green pepper, deseeded and cut into fork-sized pieces
2 tomatoes, plunged into boiling water for 20 seconds, skinned and chopped
5tbsp tinned chick peas
1tsp harissa
2tbsp creme fraiche
Salt, to taste

Soften the garlic in the olive oil. Throw in all the other ingredients, and simmer until thickened. Reducing the sauce to a rich consistency may take a good 20 minutes: the tomatoes and pepper will cause it to be very liquid at first. So you have time to cook the rice while that's happening.

Chard gratin

I should have weighed the chard before I cooked it. All I can tell you is that it was an organic bagful. The creme fraiche (Rachel's Organic) came in a tub with the quantity given by weight rather than by volume. Serves 2 to 3. The sauce may be a little runny, and need mopping up with bread or rice.

Bagful of chard
100g creme fraiche
4 heaped tbsp Gruyere
Scrapings of nutmeg
Salt and pepper

Heat the oven to gas mark 6/200C. Warm a gratin dish.

Wash the chard, and strip off the leaves. Cook them as you would spinach, tipping them (wet) into a saucepan, covering it, putting it on a high heat, giving the leaves a minute or so to start wilting, and then stirring them until they are all wilted. Drain immediately.

Chop the stalks into fork-size lengths. I put them in a saucepan with a little water (about 50ml) and a knob of butter, cover the pan, cook for five minutes, and then cook uncovered until the stalks have a buttery glaze. Some, thick-stalked chard requires longer cooking than this: I have known stalks take 20 minutes to become tender.

Squeeze the liquid from the chard leaves, chop them, and put them into the pan with the stalks. Add the creme fraiche (you could use ordinary cream, of course), cheese, nutmeg, and salt and pepper to taste (remember the saltiness of the cheese), and mix.

Tip the mixture into the warmed gratin dish, and bake for five to 10 minutes, until bubbling.

Another way with basmati

Cooking rice, an apparently simple matter, has been something of an obsession, as previous posts have shown. (The trail of experiments starts here.)

If you have trouble with the absorption method, and if you do not want to boil the rice in a large quantity of water, try this. The measurement and timing work for all the brands I have found.

Allow 75g of rice as a generous quantity for each person. Tip it into a measuring jug, check its volume, and tip it into a sieve. (I have some measuring cups, one of which holds exactly one portion, and the other, two portions.) Give it a rinse under the cold tap. Now measure four times its volume of water, bring it to a boil in a saucepan (with a little salt if you like), tip in the rice, return to a simmer, and cook, uncovered, for 10 minutes.

After the 10 minutes are up (I usually count from the moment when the water has returned to a simmer), the water will probably be just above the level of the rice. Drain what is left. If you need to hold the rice, return it to the pan, put a paper towel on top, and the lid on top of that.

Beef bindaloo

My latest New Statesman column is my last for the magazine. It contains, unusually, quite a detailed recipe, though a simple one, for beef "bindaloo".

The only mistake you can make is not to cook the curry powder with the fried onions for a good 10 minutes. It will be powdery otherwise -- "snuffy" was the term that a Victorian writer used.

This quantity of powder may not be appropriate for all commercially available brands. I might have used less of the one I had bought -- White Pearl, the pungent odour of which lingered in the house for a while.

I have not yet had a chance to read my copy of The Road to Vindaloo, which has just arrived. All I can say is that if I picked up this attractive history of Anglo-Indian cookery in a bookshop, I would instantly decide that it was an ideal present for any curry enthusiast.

Tzatziki

I fancied grating my cucumber, rather than chopping it, for my cucumber and yoghurt salad yesterday. The cucumber would be a refreshing component of the texture of the dish, rather than a distinct, crunchy contrast to the yoghurt.

The problem is that grating releases a good deal of water -- and water is a huge percentage of what a cucumber is. Salting will encourage it to disgorge more water; but then how do you get it dry? Squeezing it in a clean dishcloth or in paper towels will leave bits of it stuck all over the place. Wringing it in your hands is messy too.

I tried the manual method. But the cucumber still diluted my yoghurt to an unsatisfactory extent.

I realise now that I should have scooped out the seeds first.

When chopping the cucumber, I usually salt the pieces, which are easier to dry. In Keep It Simple (now out of print), Alastair Little and Richard Whittington recommend another method: you immerse the chopped pieces for a few seconds in boiling, salted water.

Lamb, bean and leek stew

A variation on this stew. It is quite rich: you do not need as much meat (for 4) as I recommended in the earlier version.

650g lamb neck fillet, cut into medallions
2 onions, chopped
I large leek, sliced and soaked (to wash away the grit)
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 cloves garlic, unpeeled
1 sprig rosemary
2 bay leaves
1 ladleful stock (I used chicken)
Salt
2 tins cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
3tbsp double cream
Sunflower oil
Olive oil

In a heavy casserole, warm a couple of tbsps of olive oil over a gentle heat, and sweat the onions and garlic in it, adding more oil if the vegetables threaten to catch. When they are softened, throw in the (drained) leeks, and stir to coat them in oil. (Soup and stew recipes always tell you to do that: whether the coating in fat makes any difference to the ultimate flavour must be open to question.)

I have written before that I like to brown meat on a ridged grill pan. I now coat it first with a little oil, which I think promotes browning. Toss the medallions of lamb with just a tsp or two of sunflower or groundnut oil (which have higher smoking points than olive oil). Place the pan on a medium to high heat, give it a couple of minutes to get hot, and brown the meat in batches; the process should take no more than a minute on each side. (If it takes longer, the lamb may dry out. Transfer the lamb as it browns to a plate.)

Tip the lamb into the casserole with the vegetables, and add the whole garlic, rosemary, bay, stock, and salt to taste. Transfer to an oven at gas mark 2/150C.

Check every so often to see that the stew is gently simmering; adjust the temperature accordingly. Because not much was happening to my stew after 30 minutes or so, I raised the dial to gas mark 4/180C for 20 minutes, before turning it back down to 1/140C. That low temperature was quite sufficient to maintain a simmer.

After 90 minutes, tip in the cannellini beans. Return the casserole to the oven for a further 30 minutes, before transferring it to a low light on the hob. You can squeeze the whole garlic cloves from their husks into the sauce if you like. Stir in the cream, warm through for a minute, and serve.

Welsh rarebit

The problem with Welsh rarebit recipes is that the mixture, containing beer, is quite liquid. You spread it on the toast, only to find that it oozes like lava over the sides once under the grill.

Anne O'Connell's Early Vegetarian Recipes, just out from Prospect Books, may have the answer. You warm your cheese mixture in a pan, and simply pour it over the toast. The recipe, from Mrs C S Peel's Dishes Made without Meat (Constable, 1907), states: "Slice down some good, rich cheese rather thinly, into a delicately clean stewpan, with some morsels of butter, and 2 or 3 spoonfuls of porter, good ale, or new milk as you please, according to the quantity of the cheese [early recipe books tended to assume that their readers could judge quantities]; flavour to taste with freshly ground black pepper and English mustard. Stir it all till thoroughly melted, (and) pour it over hot buttered toast."

But how do you get a browned topping? "With a hot shovel," is Mrs Peel's recommendation.

Plum crumble

Yesterday, I made a crumble with buckwheat flour. I wouldn't recommend it. The crumble was perfectly pleasant, but somewhat powdery -- which is not the quality you want. But the plums -- a blue-black variety called Swenson's -- were good. I cut them in half, stoned them, and placed them in my oven dish, before sprinkling them with a dstsp of caster sugar and vanilla essence. (Vanilla essence is not an easy substance to sprinkle; but I did my best.)

There were only two of us. I used in all 12 plums, 70g of flour, 30g of butter, 2dstsps of sugar, 2tsps of vanilla essence, and more butter for the top of the crumble. I cut the butter into small pieces, and put it back into the fridge for 30 minutes before whizzing it in the food processor just until it and the flour had combined. I stirred in my second dstsp of caster sugar, scattered the crumble mixture on top of the plums, and distributed slivers of butter on top. I baked the crumble for 35 minutes at gas mark 5/190C.

Sun-dried tomato paste

The vogue for sun-dried tomatoes has long passed its peak, as we realised that most of them were tough, and that many were flavourless. But the best brands, used with other ingredients, still have a place.

One nice way of using them, if you have a small electric whizzer, is as a paste. Put them in the whizzer with a little of their oil, some seasoning (be careful with the salt), and some chopped garlic. Last night I baked slices of aubergine until tender, spread my sun-dried tomato paste on top, placed slices of Gruyere on top of that, and put these assemblies back into the oven for a further five minutes. The paste also makes a decent alternative to tinned tomato puree.

Courgettes with egg and cheese

The late Arto der Haroutunian, whose Vegetarian Dishes from the Middle East is another winning reissue from Grub Street, describes this dish as an omelette. One might also call it a kind of souffle.

These quantities are slightly different from Haroutunian's. I should also have adapted his instructions for the courgettes, which dilute the consistency. Though not a fan of pre-salting when it comes to aubergines, I recommend it here.

Serves 2 to 3 as a main course, with rice.

2 courgettes, grated on a course mesh
50g butter
1 small onion, finely chopped
110g mushrooms, sliced
1tbsp plain flour
250ml milk
3tbsp Cheddar, grated
2tbsp chopped parsley (which I did not have)
3 eggs, separated (the recipe states 4 -- that seemed a bit much for two of us)
Salt and pepper

Put the grated courgettes in a colander, sprinkling over salt as you go. After 30 minutes, squeeze out the water.

Sweat the onion in the butter until softened. Tip in the mushrooms, and cook until the liquid they have thrown off has evaporated (you do not want it diluting the sauce later). Stir in the flour, and cook for a minute or two (you have to be careful that it does not catch, because the vegetables will have taken up some of the butter with which it should merge), before adding the milk, portion by portion, as you would when making a bechamel. Stop when you have a bubbling, thick sauce. Take it off the heat. Stir in the cheese, the parsley (if you have it), the egg yolks, and the courgettes. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Whisk the egg whites until standing in peaks, then fold them into the courgette mixture (using a turning, rather than beating, motion).

Lightly butter a gratin dish, and pour in the mixture, covering it with a sprinkling of grated Parmesan if you like. Bake at gas mark 4/180C until risen and bubbling. It takes about 35 to 45 minutes.

Serve hot, warm, or at room temperature.

Roast new potatoes

When you roast maincrop potatoes, it is worth parboiling them until the surfaces are soft and can be roughed up, and placing them in hot fat to ensure crispiness. (There are further thoughts about roast potatoes in various postings, including this one.) Waxy varieties do not require this treatment.

I still like to parboil them, but only briefly, to remove some of the surface starch and to stop them sticking to the roasting tin. (Non-parboiled roast potatoes tend to have tough coatings.) I slice them, crosswise or lengthways, into pieces about the thickness of two £1 coins. I put them in cold water, bring them to the boil, and allow them to simmer for just a minute or so. I drain them and let them steam, before tossing them in olive oil (straight from the bottle) and roasting them. Usually, gas mark 6/200C for one hour, with a turn of the potatoes half way through, works fine; but it is always worth checking to see whether they are browning too quickly.

The Charlotte potatoes I buy in France respond particularly well to this treatment. The more thinly sliced ones emerge from the oven with the texture and flavour of high-class crisps.

Stuffed aubergines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potatoes, cheese and bacon gratin

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

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

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

Chicken in yoghurt

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artichoke

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

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

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