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.

Chicken gratin

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

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

Arrange the chicken in a gratin dish.

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

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

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

Aubergine and courgette gratin

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

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

Serves 2.

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

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

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

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

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

Mackerel on the barbecue

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

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

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

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

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

Split custard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beat the eggs.

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

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

Banger to rights

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

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