Sweet potato, carrot and chick pea curry

2 onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
Sunflower oil, for frying
2tsp cumin seeds
1tsp coriander seeds
6 black peppercorns
8 cardamom pods
1 large sweet potato, peeled and cut into fork-size pieces
2 carrots, peeled and cut into fork-size pieces
1 tin chick peas
Chicken stock
1tsp turmeric
Cayenne pepper to taste
Salt to taste
Sachet of creamed coconut
Chillis, chopped

Serves 2

Fry the onions and garlic, salted, in the sunflower oil (enough to prevent their catching) over a low heat, stirring, until golden.

Meanwhile, in a dry saucepan and over a gentle heat, cook the cumin, coriander, and peppercorns until they give off a toasted aroma. Grind, with the cardamom (to release the seeds), with a pestle and mortar. Fry these spices with the onions and garlic for a couple of minutes.

Tip in the sweet potato, carrots and chick peas. Pour in a couple of ladlefuls of stock (eccentrically, I used the bacon stock that also went into my potato and cabbage soup), with the turmeric, cayenne, salt if you need it, and coconut cream. Simmer, covered, stirring from time to time, until the vegetables are soft. You'll find that they absorb and thicken the stock - I needed to add another ladleful.

As you may be able to see above, I eat mine with a generous garnish of chillis.

Potato and cabbage soup

Bacon stock
Pinch of cayenne pepper
2 large potatoes, peeled and cut into cubes
Quarter of Savoy cabbage, finely shredded, chopped, and washed

At the weekend, I boiled a knuckle of bacon. I covered it in water, brought it to a simmer, and skimmed the froth. I threw in 2 onions, 10 peppercorns, and 10 juniper berries, covered the pot, put it on a heat disperser, and simmered for two hours. The beautifully tender bacon, costing £1.50, served three. The strained liquid, chilled, became a jellied stock.

To make the soup (for 2): cover the potatoes with stock, peppered if you like, and simmer until the potatoes are very soft. Mash with a potato masher. Do not boil the soup again: it will turn starchy. Tip in the cabbage, stir in, cover, and leave for three minutes. Serve.

Poule-au-pot

The breast meat of chicken cooks much more rapidly than does the leg meat. When overcooked, it - like any foodstuff consisting of protein - dries and toughens. Keeping it tender presents a bigger challenge when you cook it in liquid than when you roast it, because the liquid is a more efficient cooking medium than oven heat.

This is the first flaw, it seems to me, of poule-au-pot recipes, which instruct you to boil the bird whole. The second is that they also tell you to cook your vegetables to the pot, adding them at intervals, according to how long you think they need. The chances are that some will emerge overcooked.

1 chicken, or hen (poule)
Water
1/2 chicken stock cube
2 onions
2 bay leaves
12 peppercorns

Leeks
Carrots

Joint the chicken, or get the butcher to do it for you. I cut mine into eight pieces: I separated the thighs and the drumsticks, and cut the breasts in half.

Put the thighs, drumsticks, backbone and giblets (if you have them - but minus the liver) into the bottom of a stockpot or deep casserole. Pour in water just to cover, and bring to a simmer. Skim the froth (though it is harmless - chefs get rid of it in order to avoid producing murky stock). Throw in the half stock cube, onions, bay leaves, and peppercorns. Cover (for thoughts on covering stock, see here), and simmer for 60 minutes. (I, liking very tender leg meat, allowed 90 minutes.) Add the breast portions. There is no need to turn up the heat to bring the liquid back to a simmer - it is hot enough. Cover, and allow another 30 minutes.

Chop off the tough leaves of the leeks, cut them down the middle, and slice. Soak them in water, to get rid of the grit. Transfer them (without their soaking water) to a saucepan, pour over a serving spoonful of stock from the chicken pot, add a knob of butter and some salt, cover and cook on a low to medium heat for five minutes. Uncover the pan and continue to cook, stirring, until the liquid has evaporated.

Peel the carrots and cut them into thick batons. Cook them in the same way as the leeks, but allowing them 10 to 12 minutes in the covered pan before removing the lid and evaporating the liquid.

We had our chicken with rice as well. Plain, boiled potatoes (new or maincrop) would also have been fine.

Serve the chicken with a spoonful or two of its stock. Keep the rest of the stock to use in other recipes. A salsa verde, or a garlic mayonnaise, would be a good accompaniment.

Conger stew

4 conger eel steaks
2 onions, sliced
Butter and a little oil for frying
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 bulb fennel, tough or discoloured outer parts removed, sliced
2 leeks, sliced and washed
4 red peppers, sliced
Waxy potatoes for 4
150ml water
Salt, pepper
Saffron (I bought a small, transparent box of threads, and used them all)

Conger may seem an exotic, even alarming ingredient; but that's what I picked at my local fishmonger. It turned out to be a good choice, because it has a monkfish-like, firm consistency.

In a heavy stockpot or casserole, soften the onions and garlic in the butter and oil (vegetables are inclined to catch in butter alone, unless you use a lot of it). Throw in the rest of the vegetables with the water, and bring to a simmer. Put in the fish, with salt and lots of pepper (or cayenne). (Ground pepper can turn bitter if cooked in a stock or stew; but the cooking time here is brief. This dish needs an ingredient that will give it a kick.)

Cover the pot, cooking at a low to medium simmer. Check progress from time to time. You'll find that the vegetables give off a lot of liquid, possibly enough to submerge everything.

The potatoes and the fish should be ready at roughly the same time. If the fish is ready first, transfer it to a dish and keep it warm in a low oven.

Turn off the heat. Last, stir in the saffron.

Serve the stew in bowls.

Lemon posset

If you have children, you may not find the word "posset" very appetising. But I assure you that this pudding, conjured out of three ingredients, is magically delicious. Serves 4-5.

350ml double cream
80g caster sugar
2 lemons, juice and zest

Gently, bring the cream and the sugar to a simmer in a small saucepan. Allow to simmer for three minutes. (I suppose that the simmering thickens and stabilises the cream, to counterbalance the curdling effect of the lemon.)

Stir in the lemon juice and zest. Divide the mixture between four (or five) bowls, cover with cling film, and refrigerate for about three hours. The posset should thicken into a blancmange-like consistency.

Omelette souffle

Slow-cooked omelettes such as frittatas or tortillas can sometimes be tough. The proteins in eggs, like those in meat, become leathery if overcooked. One way of creating a lighter-textured omelette is to souffle it.

6 eggs, separated
100g hard cheese, such as Gruyere or Cheddar, grated
A little salt, if you like (the cheese is salty)
Large knob of butter

Beat the egg yolks lightly, and fold in the grated cheese. Whip the whites. I do this with a hand whisk, until I get soft peaks when I lift the whisk from the egg. A little vinegar helps the process, apparently.

Fold the whites into the yolk/cheese mixture, turning it over repeatedly with a spoon until roughly amalgamated. (You do this gently, in order to retain the air bubbles in the egg.)

Melt the butter over a gentle heat in a heavy, non-stick, 28cm frying pan. Pour in the omelette mix, and cook until it sets on the bottom. Cook the top under the grill, at its lowest flame.

Pot-roasted lamb shoulder

I took on board Elwyn's comment (below my oxtail stew entry) when I pot-roasted a whole shoulder of lamb for our fireworks party. (Rain washed out the fireworks, so we simply ate and drank). I browned the onions in oil in my casserole dish first, but after that followed the principle behind the oxtail stew, throwing the rest of the ingredients into the pot: lamb, 2 bay leaves, sprig of rosemary, 1 head of garlic separated into cloves, salt. I had only about 50mls of chicken stock, which I poured in along with half a chicken stock cube. You may frown - but I think the cube added richness to the sauce, of which there was plenty for eight people.

You're supposed to cook meat gently. But shoulder of lamb is very forgiving. Because I was using my heaviest pot, I started cooking the dish at gas mark 6/200C, turning it down after an hour and half - and turning over the meat - once it was bubbling. The lamb, like the oxtail, browned inside the pot.

After another 45 minutes, I put the pot on the bottom of the oven, turned up the dial to 6 again, and roasted some potatoes on the top shelf.

At the end of all that, I was able to carve the meat with a spoon and fork. I strained the sauce (squeezing the garlic into it), and returned meat and sauce to the pot, to serve as a kind of stew. It was meltingly tender.

Oxtail stew made simple

I have got lazier since I wrote my previous recipe for oxtail stew. I am less fussy about submerging meet that is stewing entirely in liquid, because I have not observed that the higher temperature of a steam-filled, covered casserole causes it to toughen. However, it does brown - and that has led me to doubt whether it is necessary to brown the meat first. Simply turning it, so that each surface is exposed above the liquid, does the trick. So I rubbed my oxtails in just a little oil, which on the exposed surfaces offers some protection to the meat.

Softening onions in oil before stewing is another procedure that may not make much difference to the finished dish.

I have also grown reluctant to throw away flavoursome ingredients. The onions, having imparted their flavour to the sauce, are expendable; but it is a shame to waste the fat. The home cook has an advantage over the restaurant chef, who, largely for aesthetic reasons, must skim sauces.

Oxtail is particularly fatty. Oxtail stew with mashed potato may be a wintry treat, but, with unskimmed sauce, is too rich. Plain, boiled potatoes are fine; or rice.

4 oxtails
A little sunflower oil
2 onions, chopped
1 garlic clove, unpeeled
1 ladleful beef (or chicken) stock
Sprig of thyme
Bay leaf
1tbsp tomato ketchup
Splash of Worcester sauce
1/2 star anise (since writing the previous recipe, I've decided that a whole star anise is too assertive)
Salt

Anoint the oxtails with a little oil, and arrange them in a casserole. Surround with the onions, garlic, star anise, and herbs; pour the stock around, and add the tomato and Worcester sauces. Add salt to taste.

Cook in a low oven for three to four hours. My Le Creuset casserole will simmer very gently on a gas mark S/130C heat (but may take a good hour to get to simmering point); your oven and dish may behave differently. Turn the oxtails from time to time.

Remove the oxtails, and sieve the sauce into a saucepan. Return the oxtails to the casserole, and cover. Taste the sauce, and reduce it if you like. Serve the oxtails with the sauce poured over.

Rocket, beetroot and goat's cheese salad

This salad for two - you see half of it above - consisted of:

2 large and 4 small beetroot
1 bag rocket
125g soft goat's cheese
2tbsp pine nuts, toasted in a dry saucepan over a very low heat
1dstsp balsamic vinegar
1/2tsp grain mustard
Salt, pepper
2dstsp extra virgin olive oil, plus a little more

I like to cook beetroot (after giving them a quick wash and trim) by putting them in a bath of boiling water in an oven dish, covering them, and baking at gas mark 4/180C. They seem to emerge moister and sweeter than when baked in foil. The smaller bulbs took about an hour to soften, and the larger ones nearly two hours.

Dissolve the mustard, with salt and pepper to taste, in the vinegar. (I used Tiptree Hot East Anglian mustard, which in fact is not particularly hot, and which has a sweetness that's ideal for this dish.) Whisk in the olive oil. The dressing can be quite sharp, because the creaminess of the cheese and the sweetness of the beetroot will offset it. Wash the rocket, and toss with the dressing.

Divide the rocket between two plates. Arrange the beetroot, peeled and sliced, on top; crumble over the goat's cheese, and scatter over the pine nuts. Drizzle a little more oil over everything.

Curried salmon

This curried salmon, which I made just for me, contained:

1 salmon steak
1tbsp sunflower oil
1dstsp butter
1 onion
2 green peppers
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1tsp cumin seeds, 1/2tsp coriander seeds, 5 cardamom pods, 6 black peppercorns, toasted over a low heat in a small saucepan, and ground in a mortar
2/3 tsp turmeric
1/3tsp cayenne pepper
4 red chillis, whizzed in an electric vegetable mill until roughly chopped
Salt 

(It doesn't have to be as hot as this, of course. Ginger would have been a nice addition, as would coriander leaves, scattered over the dish at the end of cooking.) 

I warmed the oil and butter in the pan, and threw in all the ingredients except the salmon. I covered the pan and cooked everything gently, and then uncovered the pan to evaporate most of the liquid.

This process took about 30 minutes. I put in the salmon steak, and cooked it in the covered pan (again over a very low heat) for about 15 minutes. As you can see, towards the end I chopped it into three pieces to speed the cooking.

Chicken, couscous and lentils

You could of course use left-over, cooked chicken in this dish. If you did, and if you cooked the lentils in water (draining them when soft) and soaked the couscous in water, you would get a much grainier result than I did - my concoction was sludgy, because of the syrupiness of stock when reduced. Serves 4.

6 chicken thighs
3 garlic cloves - 2 whole, 1 chopped
Chicken stock
150g green lentils
150g couscous
Handful of pine kernels, toasted in a small saucepan
6 spring onions, sliced (cover them in boiling water and soak them for 30 minutes if you think they may be too assertive)
1 aubergine, cubed, tossed in olive oil, seasoned, baked for 30 minutes until tender
Handful parsley, chopped
1 lime, juiced
Olive oil
Tin of tomatoes
1tsp harissa

Put the thighs in a pan large enough to hold them in a single layer. Pour in stock (or water) to come up to a level with the tops of them. Throw in the whole garlic cloves, with a bay leaf and a few peppercorns. Bring to a simmer and cook on a low heat, covered, until very tender - about 60 to 90 minutes. Remove the thighs to a bowl, and shred.

Use the liquid in which you've cooked the chicken to boil the lentils. Wash the lentils, drain them, and cover with stock with about 2cms to spare. Bring to a simmer, cover, and cook until tender - about 30 minutes. Top up the liquid if and when necessary. When the lentils are nearly tender, uncover the pan and allow the liquid to evaporate.

Put the couscous into a measuring jug, check the level, then return it to the bowl in which you weighed it. Pour stock (you should have some left) or water into the jug to come to the same level. Bring it to a boil in a saucepan, tip in the couscous, make sure it is all soaked, and cover for five minutes.

Warm the chopped garlic in a tbsp olive oil in a saucepan. Tip in the tomatoes, with a little salt and the harissa. Add any stock you have left. (You can break up the tomatoes with a potato masher.) Simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes.

In a large bowl mix the chicken, lentils, pine kernels, spring onions, aubergines, parsley, lime, and a tbsp or two of olive oil. Serve the tomato sauce on the side.

Damson oat crumble

Hurry, while the damsons last. Their intense, tart flavour is unique. We're working our way through a compote - damsons simmered in sugared water until very soft, pushed through a sieve, and frozen in a Tupperware container. We warm up chunks of it, and eat it with a little cream or ice cream.

The following recipe comes, as do many of the pudding dishes on this blog, from Margaret Costa's Four Seasons Cookery Book (Grub Street). I quickly gave up the idea of stoning the damsons: most of the flesh adheres to the stones. So we had to pick out the stones as we ate.

It is difficult to rub butter efficiently into a mix of flour, oats and sugar. I ended up with a mixture that looked a bit like roughly ground hazelnuts. No matter.

This quantity served six at the end of a largish meal. It would be about right for four hungrier people.

675g damsons
115g brown sugar
55g porridge oats
25g plain flour
Pinch ground cinnamon
55g butter

Put the damsons in a buttered oven dish, sprinkle over half the sugar, and scatter over about 60ml of water.

In a bowl, mix the rest of the sugar, the oats, flour, and cinnamon. Rub in the butter. Do not worry about the lumpy texture.

Sprinkle the crumble mixture on top of the damsons, and bake in a mark 5/190C oven for about 30 minutes, or until the fruit is bubbling and the crumble is crunchy.

Fried cheese sandwiches

The ingredients for these three sandwiches were:

80g Gruyere, grated
2 egg yolks, beaten
1tsp mustard
Few splashes Worcester sauce
Cayenne and/or black pepper, if you like

Packeted, sliced bread works particularly well, I am afraid. Cut off the crusts. Mash the ingredients, and spread them on half of the slices, in the centre. Lay the other slices on top. You may find with this kind of bread that you can squidge the edges together.

Melt a knob of butter and a little olive oil in a frying pan, over a low to medium heat. (Use no more fat than you want to eat, because the bread will absorb it all.) Slip in the sandwiches, and fry until brown beneath - 2 to 3 minutes.

Remove the sandwiches, and add a little more butter and oil. The butter may sizzle rapidly, so to keep it from burning you may need to remove the pan from the heat. Fry the other sides of the sandwiches.

Keith Floyd and Auvergne rarebit

The news that Keith Floyd had died at the early age of 65 does not come as a huge surprise. Even in his heyday he was clearly drinking too much; my publishing friends said that he was very difficult to deal with. In recent years, as his career declined, his health was the subject of various alarming bulletins.

I first watched him rather late in his TV career, and could not quite see why he was so popular. The charm and ebullience had faded, to be replaced by a more manic quality. He didn't seem to be enjoying himself much. You were uncomfortably aware of the tensions as filming took place.

The book of Floyd on France, which someone gave to me, was a nice surprise. The instructions for many of the recipes are a little too perfunctory: I don't believe that they would all work without adjustment. But the book is inspiring, nonetheless, because it is the work of a genuine enthusiast. That is the quality that fans saw in the best of his TV work.

Floyd's version of the following recipe has five to six cloves of garlic, simply squished into the mixture. Not everyone wants to eat nearly raw garlic, and especially not in the kind of dish you are most likely to eat at lunchtime. Floyd specifies Tomme de Cantal - the young, soft version of the cheese. It is hard to find. Serves 4.

4 thick slices of white bread (crusts as well, if you like), torn into chunks
Milk
1 clove garlic, chopped
50g butter
As much cheese (Cantal, Cheddar, Gruyere - that sort of thing) as you like, cut into slivers

Pour just enough milk over the bread to give it a good soaking. You want a quantity of bread that will make a layer in a large frying pan - lay it on a large plate to check.

Melt the butter in the pan, over a low heat. Add the garlic, and stir it about. Tip in the bread, and lay the cheese on top, squishing everything down with a spatula.

Allow the mixture to brown underneath. Then brown the top under the grill.

Scrambled eggs with vinegar

I have concluded that it is best not to put vinegar and salt in the water when you poach eggs: they soften the whites, which fail to cohere. But their softening effect is ideal for scrambled eggs. To four eggs, I added 1tsp of white wine vinegar, which we could not taste when the eggs were cooked. They were deliciously soft and creamy.

Melt 1tbsp butter in a non-stick pan. Beat the eggs lightly (to encourage them to set) with the salt and vinegar, pour into the pan, and cook over a low heat, stirring regularly. Meanwhile, keep another tbsp of butter, cut into pieces, to hand.

The trick is to judge the moment when to take the pan off the heat. The eggs should be approaching the perfect state, in which they are set but still creamy, but not quite there - they will carry on cooking in the hot pan. Stir in the remaining butter, which will help to arrest the cooking process.

Potato cake

I have not found the ideal recipe for potato cakes. Ones bound with flour - as in a Simon Hopkinson recipe in Roast Chicken and Other Stories - taste too floury, in my experience (though perhaps I should have made them smaller and flatter, like Scotch pancakes). Mashed potato simply formed into patties and fried tends to fall apart. But the one above worked pretty well.

It is bound with beaten egg. I used just enough egg to bind the potato, which became alarmingly squidgy. However, once placed in hot oil in the frying pan, it cohered.

My daughter complained that the texture was too dry.

Bubble and squeak

Like Tuesday's recipe, this is an adaptation from one in my friend Carolyn's recent piece in the Guardian.

2tbsp sunflower oil
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 large potatoes, cooked and mashed
1 quarter cabbage, chopped
2 cooked sausages, sliced
80g Gruyere, grated
Salt, pepper

In a frying pan, and over a low to medium heat, soften the onion and garlic with a little salt for about five minutes. Tip in the potato, cabbage, and sausage, add salt and pepper to taste, and stir everything about a bit. Flatten the mixture with a spatula, and cook it for a further five minutes, or until the underside starts to brown.

Tip the mixture into an oven dish. Sprinkle the cheese on top, and amalgamate it a little by pressing down with a fork. Bake for about 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C.

The result is pictured above. I ate it all.

Stir-fried pork and cabbage

This is a rough approximation of a recipe from a delightful piece by my friend Carolyn Hart in the Guardian.

Bunch (6) spring onions
3 cloves garlic, chopped
450g pork mince
2tbsp sunflower oil
1/2 cabbage, chopped
1 lime, juiced
1tsp sugar
1tbsp nam pla (fish sauce)
A few splashes soy sauce

Unlike Carolyn, I threw the onions, garlic and mince into the pan with the oil at the same time. I fried the mixture on a low to medium heat. It took about 25 minutes for the mince to start to brown.

Meanwhile, I steamed the cabbage for three minutes. I drained it, and added it to the browned mince, allowing it to warm up again for a few minutes. While that was going on, I dissolved the sugar in the lime juice, and stirred in the nam pla and soy sauce. I poured the mixture into the pan, stirring and allowing it to bubble for a minute.

Carolyn's addition of coriander would have been nice - but I didn't have any.

Steamed rice, refined

Every so often, cooking rice obsesses me (see below, and previous posts, including this). The following method, I reckon, works perfectly with most of the widely available brands of Basmati rice, so I should be able to give the subject a rest for a while.

1) Soak rice for 20 minutes or longer.

2) Drain, tip into a saucepan, and cover the grains with 1.5 times their volume of cold water. Add salt, if you like.

3) Bring to the boil. Turn down the heat to its lowest, cover the pan, and put a heat disperser under it.

4) Cook for a further 10 minutes. Turn off the heat, and serve when you're ready.

Pre-soaking means that the rice will soften in less water. (If you are cooking 250g or more rice, you may find that you need less than 1.5 times its volume of water. Covering it by a mm or two should work.) By the end, its surface is dry, and it separates when stirred, even after it has stood for a while. Boiled straight from the packet and then covered, it is apt to clump.

Rice, steamed

My most recently recommended method of cooking rice works very satisfactorily. (Wash, bring twice its volume of water to the boil, tip in rice and a little salt if you like, lid on, return to boil, heat down, simmer for 10 minutes, drain.) But I get restless after doing things the same way for a while.

Yesterday, I soaked my rice for half an hour - as when you soak beans or lentils, it has a softening effect, and reduces water consumption and cooking time. I measured out water to 1.5 times the volume (of rice), poured it into a pan with a little salt, and tipped in the rice (drained). The water came to just above the level of the rice.

If you cook unsoaked rice in just 1.5 times its volume of water, it may remain hard - it will absorb the water too quickly, and the subsequent steaming will not tenderise it. The pre-soaking compensates for the less efficient tenderising process; the cooking time is probably the same as for boiling unsoaked rice. I reckoned that giving the rice a longer submersion, by starting it from cold, would aid the process.

I brought the rice to the boil in the covered pan, turned down the flame, and allowed 15 minutes in total.

The cooked grains were smaller than normal. The rice clumped a bit, but separated when fluffed with a fork. The Basmati rice available here in France tends to get mushy more readily than do the brands I buy in England, so this process may work better there. I may be on to something.