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.