Christmas timings

You can be a little more relaxed on Christmas morning if you don’t get obsessed by an ideal of military efficiency, trying to prepare every dish so that it is cooked to perfection at the precise moment you are ready to sit down at the table.

First, the turkey. We’ve all struggled with turkeys that have stubbornly leaked blood at the moment when they were supposed to be ready. But, provided you do not try to roast the bird from a frozen or semi-frozen state, you should find that it is cooked through after you have observed the standard timings (20 minutes for each 500g, plus 30 minutes). Try to arrive at this moment at least half an hour before you’re due to serve the meal. Covered in a loose tent of foil, the turkey will remain warm, and hot in places; there will be no harm in resting it for an hour.

You now have plenty of time in which to strain some of the fat from the turkey juices, and to use them to make a gravy. You can reheat the gravy at the last minute.

Bread sauce may also be heated at the last minute. It will have thickened while cooling in the pan, and may need extra milk.

Stuffing, whether cooked inside the turkey or in an oven dish, does not have to be piping hot.

You can parboil the potatoes for roasting some time before you transfer them to the hot fat in the roasting tin. In my experience, potatoes that have been sitting around for a while emerge from their roasting no less crunchy on the outside and fluffy on the inside than those tipped into the tin while hot.

So the last-minute jobs are: cook the vegetables (which your sous-chef will have prepared earlier); warm the gravy and the bread sauce; transfer the vegetables (including the potatoes) and sauces to serving dishes. I hope you manage to delegate the carving.

Stuffing
Bread sauce
Christmas things - salt cod, barley pudding, sprouts, chestnuts
Christmas tips

Gingerbread, with syrup

It is often a mistake to plan a particular recipe before you know whether you can lay hands on the ingredients. The idea is difficult to abandon, even when the ingredients are elusive; I get into my head the idea that no other recipe will do.

You cannot find black treacle or candied ginger at my nearest shops on a Sunday morning. Not allowing their absence to deter me, I used instead golden syrup and ginger preserve (from Sainsbury’s) for this recipe from Geraldene Holt’s Cakes (Prospect Books). I also used a round cake tin, because I did not have a 20cm square one.

As you can see, the cake sank in the middle, probably because my batter was more liquid than Holt's. But the texture was good throughout, and the flavour was delicious.

Lightly grease the tin with a drop or two of vegetable oil.  Put a couple of slivers of butter on the base. Lay the tin on a sheet of kitchen paper, draw a circle round it, cut round the line, and attach the circle of paper to the base of the tin.

150g butter
150g dark brown sugar
265g golden syrup (I spooned syrup out of the tin until I had taken what seemed to be the correct portion of the contents)
2 eggs, beaten
265g self-raising flour
1tsp baking powder
2-3tsp ground ginger
1/2tsp cinnamon
Walnut-sized knob of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
1tbsp ginger preserve

Cream the butter and the sugar. I lack a food mixer, so find this pretty hard work. I’m never sure when to stop, tending to do so when I cannot bear the effort any longer. The mixture is supposed to be light.

Stir in the syrup, and then the eggs. Mix the flour and baking powder, and stir them in to the mixture. Add the rest of the ingredients. Spoon into the cake tin, and smooth level.

Bake in a gas mark 3/170C oven for about 60 minutes, or until an inserted skewer emerges clean. I found that my gingerbread was still liquid in the centre after an hour, though the perimeter was quite dark. I turned down the oven to gas mark 1/140C, for a further 15 minutes.

Lesley Blanch; moussaka topping

Lesley Blanch’s Round the World in Eighty Dishes is another lovely reissue from Grub Street. Blanch was an exotic, bold, beautiful, adventurous woman, of a type that seems no longer to exist. An artist and designer, a features editor at Vogue, she roamed the world, had many admirers, and was for 15 years the wife of French novelist Romain Gary. She wrote 12 books herself, and lived to the age of 102.

Grub Street's book is what the title says. Blanch introduces the recipes with pen portraits, anecdotes, and evocations. Of Tchaktchouka, one of the various north African dishes that involve a poached egg sitting in a stew of tomatoes, onions and peppers, she writes: “I don’t know how you will like this; but I loved it, as I sat among my Arab friends in the evening twilight, and the huge stars shone in the greenish sky, while the camels tethered to the palms above groaned and snorted for their own dinner – nothing nearly so nice.”

My only complaint is that the book has no index. Having spotted a moussaka recipe, I had trouble finding it again, because it appears in the Middle Eastern section – the recipe is from Syria, Blanch says. It reminded me that the topping for a moussaka can be yoghurt-based, rather than a sort of béchamel soufflé.

Blanch’s topping recipe contains 4 eggs, 3tbsps of flour, a jar of yoghurt, and salt and pepper. How large is a jar of yoghurt? I have no idea. For my version, I used a 170g pot of Total yoghurt, 1tbsp of flour (which stabilises the yoghurt, so that it does not split), and 2 beaten eggs. The mixture is runny, but sets when cooked on a moderate heat (gas mark 3/170C), and has a pleasing sharpness.

Falafels - Slater

Browsing through Nigel Slater’s The 30-Minute Cook after I had checked his spiced mackerel recipe, I came across his recipe for falafels. The version below includes far less garlic than Slater recommends, because we were eating the falafels at lunchtime, but as much cumin and coriander, even though I used one tin of chickpeas rather than his two.

The quantities below make what you see in the pan: a snack for two.

1 tin chick peas
1/2 a medium onion
2tsp cumin seeds
2tsp coriander seeds
1 clove garlic
Salt
1tbs flour

Drain and rinse the chick peas. Tip them into the bowl of a food processor. Peel the onion, cut it in half again (to aid the mixing process), and add it to the bowl.

In a dry saucepan over a gentle heat, toast the cumin and coriander. Ground them in a mortar. Add them to the chick peas and onion. Cut the garlic into a few pieces, put it into the mortar with a little salt, and grind it to a paste. Add this, too, to the bowl, with more salt if you like – but be careful with the salt if your chick peas were tinned in salted water. Whizz until blended.

Tip the mixture out of the food processor bowl into another bowl, add the flour, and squidge everything together with your hands. Add more flour if the mixture fails to cohere. Form the mixture into small balls or patties.

Warm a generous layer – about 1/2cm - of oil (sunflower, groundnut, or olive) in a heavy pan, and fry the falafels, in batches if necessary, until brown on each side and warmed through. Be careful – the moisture in the onion particularly will cause the oil to spit. Serve with Greek-style yoghurt.

Spiced mackerel

This is adapted slightly from a recipe in The 30-Minute Cook by Nigel Slater, who in turn adapted it from a recipe in Plats du Jour by Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd. The chief difference in my version is that I cook the fish in the oven – easier than grilling them.

4 mackerel
4tsp cumin
1/2tsp cayenne pepper
4 cloves garlic, mashed with salt
Olive oil
4tbsp lemon juice

Slash the skins of the mackerel in various places.

If you have cumin seeds (rather than powder), toast them in a dry saucepan over a gentle heat, and then grind them, preferably in a mortar and with a pestle. Tip the cumin into a bowl.

Cut up the garlic a little, put it into the mortar with some salt, and grind it to a pulp. Or you could mash the garlic with the blade of a knife on a chopping board.

Return the cumin to the garlic in the mortar, with the cayenne. Stir in just enough oil to make a thick but spreadable paste. Smear the paste over the mackerel, and leave the fish for a while if you have time.

Line an oven dish or roasting tin with foil. Place the mackerel on the foil, and smear them with the spicy paste. Leave the fish for a while if you have time. (The picture shows the uncooked fish.)

Heat the oven to its highest setting. Bake the fish for seven to 10 minutes, or until cooked through. Sprinkle them with the lemon juice, and serve.

We ate the mackerel with potatoes Anna.

Potato gnocchi with spinach and cheese

Instructions about how much flour to use in potato gnocchi vary a good deal. Marcella Hazan suggests 225g flour to 900g of potatoes, in a recipe that she says will serve 6-8. In a recent recipe in the Financial Times (reproduced in the Week), Rowley Leigh gave only 75g of flour to 1.5kg of potatoes, alleging that his recipe served 4.

My worry about the Leigh recipe is over whether the gnocchi would cohere. If you increase the flour content, though, you have to be sure you’ll enjoy a squidy, doughy result. I’m happy with squidginess, so I settled on the following quantities, for decent platefuls for 2. I used gluten-free flour.

600g potatoes
200g spinach
150g flour
1 egg, beaten
2tbsp Parmesan
Salt
Pepper
Nutmeg
Knob of butter

Peel the potatoes, cut them into even chunks, put them into a pan of cold water with a tsp of salt, bring to the boil, and simmer until tender. Drain, and mash. (I used a potato ricer.)

Meanwhile, wash the spinach. Pile it into a saucepan, clamp on the lid, and put it on a high heat. After a minute or two, when the spinach starts to wilt, start stirring it until it has all wilted. Drain.

When the spinach has cooled down a little, squeeze it in your hands. It will appear to be capable of disgorging water endlessly, so you have to decide when enough is enough. Chop it very finely, or whizz it in a food processor.

Mix the potato, spinach, flour, egg, and 1tbsp of Parmesan, with salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste. Knead the mixture gently, until it is a sticky mass.

Take bits of the mixture, and on a lightly floured chopping board or work surface roll them into thin sausages – about half way between a chipolata and full-size sausage. Cut the sausages into 2cm pieces. My crude efforts are picture above.

Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Drop in the gnocchi. As the water returns to the boil, the gnocchi will rise to the surface. Give them a further minute or so, and drain.

Melt the butter in a gratin dish. Tip in the gnocchi, and stir. Sprinkle over the rest of the Parmesan, and put the dish into a gas mark 6/200C oven until the cheese browns.

Toad in the hole, in a frying pan

The cast-iron frying pan (28cm) in the picture, like my shallow casserole dish (Steamed fish, spring onion sauce), will go in the oven as well as on the hob. Because my smallest roasting tin was too large for the quantity of batter I needed, I used the frying pan for a toad in the hole.

The batter (for 3 to 4)

100g flour
2 eggs
250ml liquid – 200ml whole milk/50ml water
Salt

In the past I have advocated pouring the flour gradually into the liquid. But, as long as you do not beat the mixture too vigorously, I think that the other way round works fine too. So: fold the eggs into the flour, and gradually add the milk/water mix, blending it with a whisk with each addition. Add salt to taste.

You are supposed to allow the batter to rest for half an hour. The resting helps develop the gluten that will bind it, but may not be necessary.

Heat the pan in a gas mark 6/200C oven, with a couple of tbsps of sunflower oil. After 10 minutes, take out the pan, and put it on the hob, on a low/medium heat. Pour in the batter.

Roll the sausages in a little oil, which will help to prevent the exposed skin from drying and cracking. Place the sausages in the batter, and put the pan back into the hot oven for 30 minutes, or until the batter is set and browned.

The batter does not have such a crispy base as it would have developed in a roasting tin, but is fine in every other respect.

Toad in the hole

Beef stew with red wine

The standard way to cook a stew – apart from a pale one, such as a blanquette – is to brown the meat, and then to submerge it in barely simmering liquid. The browning adds flavour, and the submerging ensures that the meat is not subjected to an overly aggressive heat.

If the liquid does not cover the meat, the exposed surfaces will brown while the stew cooks. In theory, this method should be less satisfactory, because a temperature that is high enough to brown meat will eventually dry it out. But you may find, particularly with cuts that have plenty of lubricating fat and connective tissue, that the result is perfectly tender anyway.

Serves 2 to 4

Sunflower or olive oil
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 onions, chopped
500g stewing steak
250ml red wine (I had a small bottle of Marks & Spencer Claret that I had received in a goody bag)
1 bay leaf
1/2 star anise
1 bay leaf
10 peppercorns
Salt to taste
1 carrot, diced

In a heavy casserole over a gentle heat, soften the garlic and onions in a couple of tbsps of oil, adding more oil if the vegetables threaten to stick. When the onions are soft, add the rest of the ingredients, apart from the carrot. Bring the contents of the dish just to simmering point, cover it, and put it in the oven at gas mark 2/150C. Turn down the heat to gas mark S/130C once the contents are simmering again. Stir from time to time. A cooking time of two and a half to three hours is usually about right.

In most stew recipes, you would soften the carrot with the onions. But I think that you get the best flavour from carrots if they are not overcooked. Throw in the dice half an hour before the end.

The next bit is slightly tedious. Tip the contents of the casserole into a sieve over a saucepan. Pick out the meat, return it to the casserole, cover, and return the casserole to the oven.

Press down on the vegetables in the sieve, and scrape the thick juice that adheres to the underside of the sieve into the saucepan. Discard the vegetables.

Put the pan on the hob on a medium to high flame, and boil until the sauce thickens slightly, has a rich flavour, and seems to be of the right volume to satisfy two or three people. Take the casserole out of the oven, pour the sauce over the meat, and serve.

Steamed fish, spring onion sauce

A large (28cm), shallow, cast iron and enamelled casserole dish is a great accessory. You can fry in it, roast in it (I used it recently for a shoulder of lamb) make stews in it, and use it for large gratins; because of its size, you can easily transfer it from the stove top to the oven. Because of its weight, you can keep things warm in it for a while. So, for example, I was able to drain off the sauce from my roast lamb, carve the lamb and put the pieces back in the casserole and cover them, finish the sauce, and then pour the sauce back over the lamb for serving. Had I felt it necessary, I could have warmed the carved lamb and sauce on the hob.

The dish will also contain large fish fillets, and keep them warm while you make a sauce.

2 fish fillets (I had smoked haddock)
1/3 pint of milk
A few peppercorns
A bay leaf
A scraping of nutmeg
Salt (smoked fish will already be salty)
18g unsalted butter
1dstsp flour
4 spring onions, chopped

Put the fish in a heavy dish or saucepan, and cover with the milk. Add the peppercorns, bay leaf, nutmeg, and salt (if using).

Cover the pan, and put it over a medium flame on the hob. Check to see when the milk starts simmering, and when it does turn down the flame to its lowest (with the pan still covered). The fish should be tender about five minutes after the milk simmers.

Meanwhile, make a roux: melt the butter in a small saucepan over a gentle heat, add the flour, and cook gently for a minute. The mixture should be the texture of loose sand. Add more butter or flour as necessary. Set aside.

Remove the fish to a chopping board or plate, strain the milk into a jug, return the fish to the pan or dish, and cover.

Put the pan with the roux back on the hob, above a medium heat. Stir in the milk from the jug, a little at a time, incorporating each portion before adding the next. After the second or third addition, throw in the spring onions, which will throw off liquid and thin the sauce. Keep adding milk until you have a sauce of a texture you like, adding more from a bottle (or carton) if necessary.

Serve the fish with the sauce poured on top.

Chorizo sauce for pasta

For 2

4 chorizos (the uncooked kind)
Olive oil
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 large red onion, sliced
1 large red pepper, deseeded, cut into fork-size pieces
Salt

Chorizos, unlike ordinary sausages when cut up, do not have a tendency to stick to the pan. You may not get a sauce flavoured with crusty bits, but you do get the paprika-spiked oil that the sausages release.

How you cut them up is a matter of taste. You may like discs; I prefer to skin them, and chop them into small pieces.

Put a splash of oil into a heavy pan over a gentle heat. Throw in the chopped chorizos, and fry them gently until they lose their raw colour and throw off their oil. You may find that you now have plenty of oil with which to cook the garlic, onion, and pepper, which you add to the pan now, with a little salt. Stir everything, and cover the pan, cooking the contents gently until the onions and peppers are soft. If they exude a lot of liquid, evaporate it by uncovering the pan while you cook the pasta.

I like conchiglie (shells), or tortiglioni (big tubes, larger than penne), with this.

Of course, numerous variations are possible. You might, for example, add cumin (1tsp), throwing it into the pan and frying it for a minute before adding the vegetables. You might heat up the sauce with dried chillis, or with a tsp of harissa, stirred in once the onions and peppers have started to collapse.

Spiced salmon

For 2.

1tsp cumin seeds
1tsp coriander seeds
1/2tsp mustard seeds
1 heaped tbsp Greek yoghurt
1/2tsp turmeric
Cayenne pepper to taste
1/2tsp fresh ginger, minced
Salt
2 salmon fillets 

In a small saucepan over a gentle heat, lightly toast the cumin, coriander, and mustard seeds. Ground them in a mortar. Mix these spices with the yoghurt, and stir in the turmeric, cayenne, ginger, and salt. You’ll have a stiff paste. Smear it over the salmon. Leave the marinated fillets in the fridge for a few hours, if you have time. (The yoghurt will help the marinade to penetrate the fish, to a certain extent.)

Bake the fillets in a gas mark 6/200C oven. They should be ready in 10-12 minutes.

I didn’t have any lemon or lime. But the fish would have benefited from a squeeze of juice before serving.

Nigella's fries

You may have seen, in the first episode of Nigellissima! on Monday night (24 September), that Nigella Lawson cooked her chips by immersing them in cold oil, and then heating them. It seems eccentric, but really is based on the same theory that informs the double- and triple-cooking methods: boiling the chips first in moderately hot oil or water, before browning them at high heat.

I usually adopt a method half way between single- and double-cooking: starting the potatoes in moderately hot oil, and then simply turning up the heat. It works fine. Would Nigella’s method – I have met her a few times, but somehow wouldn’t feel presumptuous in using her first name even if I hadn’t, as one doesn’t with Delia or Jamie – work just as well? Or would it work only for the waxy potatoes she specifies at the BBC website, and not for the Maris Pipers I used?

I didn’t bother about chopping off the rounded ends of the potatoes. I sliced them horizontally – they were of medium size – before chipping them, and placing them in a pan of sunflower oil. I put the pan on a back, medium ring of my hob, and set the flame at medium to high.

Perhaps because I was cooking only a single, albeit generous, portion, I found that the oil was soon bubbling. At this point, I lost my nerve, and turned down the flame to low for about seven minutes, to allow the potatoes to cook through. Then I turned up the flame again, to brown them. I stirred them, carefully, from time to time. The entire process took about 20 minutes.

In the end, this technique differed only slightly from my usual one. It works so well that I would never be tempted to go through the much more laborious triple method, for what could be, at best, only a marginal improvement.

Nigella’s Tuscan fries

Sceptical Cook: Chips

Bacon hock 2

I see from my previous post on this subject that I recommended simmering bacon hock in a heavy, uncovered pan, so that only a bubble or two rose to the surface of the liquid. The theory is that this sub-boiling temperature is quite sufficient to tenderise the meat, whereas a faster boil might dry it out.

That is the theory. But yesterday, I simmered a bacon hock for two hours in water that showed scarcely any activity, and discovered when it was on the plate that it was not as tender as I had hoped. I suspect that, despite the science, a covered pan would have produced a more pleasing result.

I covered the hock with several cms to spare, so that I could ladle off some of the liquid for cooking lentils. I had soaked the lentils (Puy; 100g, for 2) for two hours – they cook more readily after this treatment, I find. I barely covered them with the stock, and simmered them, with an unpeeled garlic clove, in a covered pan, topping up the liquid when they threatened to dry out. Meanwhile, I softened an onion with a clove of chopped garlic in olive oil. When the lentils were soft (after about 30 minutes), I tipped them on to the onion, allowing them to simmer further until there remained just enough liquid to moisten them. I squeezed the garlic from its skin, and stirred it in. Because of the saltiness of the bacon, the lentils needed only a little salt, but benefited from several grindings of pepper.

Bacon hock

Brining pork chops

In my last entry, I wrote about my unsatisfactory experiment with brining chicken. But I have had much more joy from brining pork chops.

This time, I took my advice from Matthew Fort, who in turn was indebted to Heston Blumenthal in recommending a 5% solution. My brine consisted of 1 litre of water, 50g table salt, 25g caster sugar, and about 10 black peppercorns and 10 juniper berries, the latter lightly crushed. I put three chops in an oven dish, poured over the brine, covered the dish with cling film, and refrigerated it for 4 hours.

My mistake was to fail to dry the chops thoroughly. I put my heavy, shallow oven dish over a medium heat on the hob, waited for it to get hot, poured in a little sunflower oil, and fried the chops. But because of their moisture, they failed to brown. So I had to turn up the heat to maximum. The result was that there were lots of charred patches on the dish by the time the chops were browned. So I had to clean the pan before making the sauce, sacrificing a good deal of flavoursome material.

I put the chops in a low oven while I softened four sliced shallots, along with four bashed cloves of garlic (to flavour the sauce, rather than to be eaten with it), in a little butter. Then I added a tbsp of white wine vinegar, boiled it hard to evaporate it, and poured in 150ml of chicken stock, boiling it until it thickened slightly. Last, away from the heat, I stirred in a knob of butter.

Pork chops are so often dry and tough. These were tender and delicious.

Brining chicken revisited

One of the most visited posts on this blog is Heston’s Roast Chicken (link below). In it, I express scepticism about the process of brining a chicken before roasting it. But some cooks continue to swear by brining, both for chicken and - as popularised by Nigella Lawson - turkey.

When I came across “Perfect roast chicken” in America’s Test Kitchen (a book I introduced in the previous post, on Skillet lasagne), I decided to give the method another go - particularly because this brining lasts for just one hour. It produces “maximum juiciness and well-seasoned meat”, the Test Kitchen authors assert.

The brine recipe (translated from US measurements) is: 4 litres of water; 150g salt; 100g caster sugar. Some writers instruct you to boil the mixture, allowing it to cool before dunking the meat; but you should find that table salt will dissolve readily in cold water.

Submerge the chicken in the brine in a non-reactive container. After an hour, remove the chicken, pat it dry with paper towels, rub the chicken with a little oil, and insert some butter between the skin and the breast.

The book advises you to cook the chicken at 200C/gas mark 6, turning it several times. I prefer to start at this temperature, and to dial it down to 170C/gas mark 3, or lower (depending on progress), after 30 minutes. I also ignored the advice about turning the chicken, because I usually find that this causes the skin to tear.

I remain a sceptic. The breast meat of a brined chicken may be moister, but it seems to me to have a consistency that evokes blotting paper. If the only alternative is dry and tough, I’d still prefer it.

Pork chops, though, are another matter. I’ll write about them next week.

Heston's roast chicken

Skillet lasagne

As the title, and indeed the entire concept suggests, this is an American recipe. It comes from The Complete America’s Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook, accompanying a show that, having been through 12 seasons, has spawned a tie-in that weighs 28 kilos. It is quite American, with a Stepford Wives-ish flavour and chapter headings such as “Who wants pasta?”, “The Flair of the French”, and “It’s grill time!”, but it has lots of valuable advice on why the recipes work, and on what methods the team discarded before coming up with their final versions. I may become slightly obsessed with it.

My recipe is an adaptation, in part because I was cooking for a different number of people.

The only ricotta in my corner shop was Cypriot, and turned out to be quite unlike the real thing: as you can see in the picture above, slices of it remained intact when warmed.

Serves 3 to 4

Olive oil
1 onion, peeled and chopped
3 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
Dried chillis to taste, finely chopped (in a coffee grinder or small electric mill)
200g minced beef
200g minced pork
Salt
1 bay leaf
300g lasagne sheets (the variety that does not need pre-cooking)
500g carton passata
Water or stock
200g ricotta
4tbsp Parmesan, grated

Warm a tbsp or 2 of olive oil over a low to medium heat in a 28cm frying pan, if you have one with a lid. (I used a shallow casserole dish.) Throw in the onion, garlic, and chillis (if using), and cook, stirring, until softened – about five minutes. Regulate the heat, and/or add more oil, if the onion threatens to catch.

Add the pork and beef mince, along with salt to taste and the bay leaf, and continue to cook until the meat is broken up and is no longer pink. (The book does not suggest that you need to brown the mince, and is in line with other recipes in giving this advice – see previous entries on Bolognese and moussaka.)

Turn the heat to its lowest. Break each lasagne sheet into four or five pieces, and lay the pieces on top of the meat. Pour over the passata, along with enough water or stock to cover the lasagne pieces.

Turn up the flame slightly to bring the contents of the pan to a simmer, then turn it down again, and put on the lid.

Stir the meat and lasagne mixture after five minutes. Try to separate the lasagne pieces, which may stick together. Put the lid back on, but keep stirring the dish regularly.

This kind of lasagne absorbs a good deal of liquid. You may find that you have to add more water or stock, particularly because the thickened mixture may threaten to stick to the pan.

The lasagne should be tender after 20 to 25 minutes. Take it off the heat, and stir in 2tbsp of Parmesan. Dot the surface with dollops of ricotta, cover again, and leave to stand for five minutes.

Sprinkle with the remaining Parmesan, and serve.

I missed the béchamel. But this version was very nice in its own right.

Browning mince

Armenian rice pudding

This is a delicious and easy pudding, adapted from Arto der Haroutunian’s Middle Eastern Cookery (Grub Street). It is traditionally served to visitors on the birth of a son, he tells us. "When I asked my mother what people served on the birth of a daughter, she gesticulated with her hands, shrugged her shoulders and said: 'Oh, a glass of orangeade or something like that.'"

I used raisins rather than the sultanas in the recipe, and pine kernels rather than split almonds, which some members of my family do not like.

75g pudding rice
1 pint milk
Peel of 1 lemon
100g raisins
100g caster sugar
2tbsp (yes, really) vanilla essence
50g pine kernels, toasted in a small saucepan over a very gentle heat

Bring a pan of water to the boil, throw in the rice, bring the water back to the boil, and drain. You’re getting rid of some of the surface starch and dust.

Put the drained rice into a heavy saucepan with the milk and the lemon peel. (I managed to peel my lemon in about five vertical strips.) Bring slowly to the boil, and simmer gently, uncovered, until the rice is tender and the milk is absorbed – by this, I took Haroutunian to mean that you want a consistency like that of a thickly soupy risotto. Stir in the raisins and simmer for a few more minutes. (I soaked the raisins first in boiling water, perhaps unnecessarily.)

Remove from the heat, and stir in the sugar, vanilla, and pine kernels. Chill.

Remove the lemon peel before serving, and loosen with a little milk or cream if you like.

These quantities will provide about six modest portions.

Potatoes, and when to peel them

Some people insist that potatoes boiled in their skins produce the best mash. I am doubtful, but perhaps this is because I have allowed the potatoes to cool before peeling: the flesh has firmed up, requiring more vigorous efforts with the masher, which has released more starch, which has given the mash a gluey quality. (Making potato salad, you should dress the potatoes with vinaigrette when they’re hot, so that their looser textures absorb more sauce.)

One possible solution, I suppose, would be to wear a rubber glove on one hand, hold the potatoes in it, and peel them with the other. But I have never found peeling cooked potatoes as easy as it is reputed to be. The skin often comes away in tiny strips, which stick to one’s fingers.

I wondered whether a potato ricer or a food mill, which will de-skin cooked tomatoes, would spare me the aggravation. So I tried both yesterday. Neither was satisfactory.

It’s back to pre-peeling, I’m afraid.

Plum tart 2

With the addition of a dessert spoonful of sugar and a few drops of vanilla, and with the cheese omitted, the savoury custard in my previous post became a filling for this plum tart.

The pastry included 150g flour; 75g of butter, cubed and rubbed in; another dessert spoonful of sugar, stirred in; and a few teaspoons of water to bind it. As usual, lacking the skill and patience for pastry-rolling, I shoved the dough into the lightly greased (with sunflower oil) tin, and worked it into place by hand.

I baked the pastry blind for about 20 minutes at gas 6/200C, until it was firm. (I took a risk in not weighing it down with foil topped by baking beans; it didn’t buckle.) I spread halved and pitted plums over the surface, scattered sugar over them, poured the sweetened custard on top, and baked the tart at gas mark 3/170C for 30 minutes.

I don’t believe the pastry would have improved with rolling. It was crisp and buttery.

This was much simpler, and just as good, as the tart in the recipe below. Also, I no longer include salt in the pastry mix, believing that it encourages the development of gluten.

Plum tart

Savoury custard topping

Sparing flour in consideration of a gluten intolerance in the family, I made this as a topping for a gratin of aubergines and tomatoes. Double cream might be a safer option than the crème fraiche, of which many factory-produced brands tend to split, in my experience. Any hard cheese would do instead of the Comté, though Comté and Gruyere would be my favourites.

For a gratin serving 3 to 4

1 egg, beaten
150ml crème fraiche
50g Comté, grated
A few scrapings of nutmeg

Beat the cream into the egg until well amalgamated. Stir in the cheese and the nutmeg.

Pour the custard over your gratin, and bake at gas mark 3/170C for 20-25 minutes, or until the top is golden.

Aubergine gratin (the one I made this time included onions in the tomato sauce; also, I prepared the aubergines the same way, but fried them gently rather than roasting them)