Greengage and blackberry fool

A very simple pudding. You use roughly the same quantity of cream as of fruit compote. The amount of sugar you need will vary according to the kind of fruit (or, in the case of rhubarb, vegetable). This fool includes about 20 greengages, two small punnets of blackberries, 2tbsps of caster sugar, 400ml of double cream, and 1tsp of vanilla essence.

Put about 50ml of water into a heavy saucepan, and throw in the greengages and blackberries with the sugar. Cover, bring to a simmer, and cook gently, stirring from time to time, until the fruit is very soft - no more than 15 minutes, probably. Force the compote through a sieve into another saucepan, pushing and stirring the fruit with a spoon.

Bring the sieved compote to a simmer again, and cook until it is lava-like in consistency, with big bubbles breaking the surface. Test for sweetness. Pour the compote into a bowl, and allow to cool. (It will thin the cream if it is hot.)

Whip the cream, with the vanilla if using, and stop as soon as it stiffens. (If you keep beating, it will become almost solid, and grainy too.)

Blend the cream and the compote, and chill for a couple of hours.

Lamb leg steaks

These are steaks, which you would fry or grill, but from the leg, which you would roast. So how to cook them? I chose a compromise.

The marinade includes a garlic clove, crushed with salt; the juice of half a lemon; and about three tbsps of olive oil. The steaks sat in it for only half an hour.

I got a ridged grill pan very hot, scraped excess marinade off the steaks, and seared them (one at a time) for only a minute each side, just long enough to give them a griddled appearance. I returned them to the marinade in the oven dish, and roasted them for 30 minutes at gas mark 6/200C. Those who prefer their lamb to be less well done could allow at least 10 minutes fewer.

As you can see, they produced a fair amount of sauce.

Chocolate cheesecake

150g digestive biscuits
75g butter
3tsp gelatine*
500g ricotta or cottage cheese (drain the cottage cheese)
1 397g tin condensed milk (about 300ml)
200ml double cream, whipped until slightly thickened
100g dark chocolate

Rub a tiny bit of oil over a 20cm flan dish, or line and grease a 20cm springform cake tin (see here).

I whizzed the biscuits in a food processor, cut the butter into pieces, threw them in, and whizzed again until all the crumbs were buttery. But this base did not have the crunchiness I like. So my advice is to melt the butter in a saucepan over a very gentle heat, remove the pan from the heat, tip in the biscuit crumbs, and mix thoroughly with a spoon. Tip the crumbs into the dish or tin, and compact them with the back of a spoon. Put the dish or tin into the freezer to firm up.

Put about 4tbsp of cold water into a small saucepan. Sprinkle over the gelatine, and swirl the water about until the powder is thoroughly soaked. Set aside.

In a bowl, stir together the ricotta, condensed milk, and cream until thoroughly blended. (You may prefer to use 500ml cream alone, without the condensed milk. In which case, throw in 60g caster sugar too.)

Place a bowl in a saucepan of gently simmering water so that the base of the bowl does not touch the water. Break up the chocolate, throw it in, and stir until melted. Remove from the heat.

Add a few spoonfuls of the cheese and cream mixture to the chocolate - stirring them together will help to release the chocolate from the side of the bowl. Tip this mixture into the bowl of cheese and cream, and blend.

Put the saucepan with the gelatine on to the lowest possible flame, and stir. As soon as the powder dissolves and the mixture clarifies, remove it from the heat. (Boiling gelatine disables its setting qualities.) Keep stirring until thoroughly dissolved. Pour the gelatine into the cheese mixture, and blend thoroughly.

Remove the biscuit base from the freezer, and pour over the cheese mixture, levelling it with a knife. Cover the dish or tin with foil (create a tent above the filling if you're using a flan dish), and refrigerate for at least three hours.

This cheesecake is based loosely on one in CLASSIC CHEESE COOKERY by Peter Graham (Grub Street). Graham also includes 3 limes, creme de menthe, and mint leaves; his cheesecake contains a hefty 280g of chocolate. The disadvantage of my quantity is that the pale brown of the filling is not particularly attractive. But 280g would be a bit much, I think. You could leave out the chocolate altogether, and just have lime juice (and zest), or lemon, or a combination of the two. Three fruit in total, I think.

*Graham's recipe has 20g of gelatine, which is far more than I used, or needed, or would have needed even had I included the lime juice. Different gelatines (and particularly different leaf gelatines) have different strengths. Check the recommended quantities on the packet. If you use leaf gelatine (three leaves may be the equivalent of 3tsp), you can prepare it in the same way: soaking, and then warming very gently.

Chorizo and chick pea stew

New potatoes for 2
Olive oil
4 chorizos (the kind you cook, not the salami-type), skinned and cut into pieces
1 clove garlic, chopped
1tsp cumin seeds
2 medium red onions, sliced
2 red peppers, deseeded and cut into fork-sized pieces
1 tin chick peas, drained and rinsed
1tsp harissa, or cayenne pepper to taste

Scrape the potatoes. Cut them into even-sized chunks, put them into a pan of cold, salted water, bring to the boil, and simmer gently until tender.

While the potatoes are cooking, put a splash of oil into a heavy pan, and fry the chorizos over a gentle heat, until they release their own, paprika-hued oil. Throw in the garlic and cumin, and fry for a minute; throw in the onion, and cook for about five minutes, until slightly softened. (Add more oil if the slices threaten to catch. But you may not need it.) Tip in the peppers and chick peas, stir in the harissa or cayenne, cover, and cook gently.

When you have drained the potatoes, stir them into the stew. Continue to cook until the onions and peppers are soft.

This dish might also include tinned or whole, chopped tomatoes (to skin them, drop them into boiling water for 20 seconds, cool them under cold water, and peel off the skins), added with the peppers and chick peas. You may want to cook the stew uncovered, to thicken the tomato sauce.

You might also poach a couple of eggs with the stew - a common recipe in Middle Eastern cooking. I crack the eggs into a cup before tipping them, very gently, on to the surface of the simmering ingredients. They will cook in an uncovered pan, but I usually cover it, and give them about five minutes.

P.s. I've decided to switch to the verdana typeface. It is spacier than arial, and more readable, in my view.

A non-Victorian sponge

Most Victoria sponge recipes (this one, for example) instruct you to cream butter and sugar, mix in the eggs, and fold in the flour. An alternative way of making sponge cake is to blend the butter, sugar, and flour first, before almagamating the eggs. You give the flour more of a going over, developing more gluten, which helps to give the cake a coherent texture as it rises. In theory, a Victoria sponge will be lighter, because the flour is merely folded in to the other ingredients. But this version was not stodgy at all. I'm afraid that my effort collapsed slightly in the middle, in spite of the bizarre attempt I made to stabilise it (see below), probably because I took it out of the oven too soon.

These proportions are slightly different from those in the Victoria sponge recipe. But I did not use all the egg. If I had been making a sponge sandwich, I would have doubled the ingredients, dividing the batter between two tins.

100g self-raising flour (or plain flour, plus 1tsp baking powder)
100g caster sugar
100g softened butter
1tsp vanilla essence (optional)
2 eggs, beaten

Pre-heat your oven to gas mark 4/180C. Put in a baking sheet.

Place a 20cm springform cake tin on a piece of greaseproof paper, draw round it, and cut along the pencil mark. Smear a very small piece of butter on the base of the tin, stick the round piece of paper on top, and smear a little oil on the surface of the paper and round the sides of the tin.

In a food processor, blend the flour, sugar, and butter, in short pulses, until you have a stodgy mass. Tip the mixture into a bowl, and stir in the vanilla (if using) and a portion of the egg. Keep adding egg until you have a gloopy batter; it should drop off a spoon, but reluctantly. If you've used up all the egg before you get to this stage, add a little milk too.

Tip the batter into the cake tin, spread it out and level the surface, and put the tin on top of the baking sheet in the oven. Bake for about 25 minutes, or until an inserted skewer emerges clean.

Now the bizarre trick, recommended by Peter Barham in The Science of Cooking: drop the cake tin from a height of about 30cms on to a hard surface (I hope the spring is secure). The theory is this: as a cake cools, the air bubbles in it deflate, like collapsing balloons. Dropping the cake allows some of the bubbles to break, letting in air, which sustains the structure. It didn't work for me - but I'm pretty sure my mistake was complacently to neglect the skewer check.

Crackling perfection

A feature of this blog has been its obsessive revisiting of certain dishes - crackling, rice, cheesecakes - in a largely futile search for perfection. As the last crackling I made was perfect, I won't apologise for writing about it.

Frying was the answer. In my previous blog on the subject, I recommended grilling. But frying enables you to control the heat more easily, particularly because of the layer of fat in the pan.

I had braised slices of belly pork, for an hour and a half, in a broth flavoured with onion, juniper berries, and peppercorns. (The pork went into a salad.) At the end, I sliced off the rind, and let it dry.

I warmed just enough sunflower oil to give a thin layer in a heavy frying pan. On the lowest flame, I fried the pieces of rind, turning them frequently to prevent their burning. Until the water had vaporised, they crackled and bucked alarmingly. After about 15 minutes, they were crisp and golden; they shattered in the mouth like honeycomb.

Pasta with ricotta and spinach

A sauce made with ricotta left over from the cheesecake recipe. For 2.

250g spinach
1 clove garlic, crushed with a little salt
Small knob of butter
200g ricotta
150g double cream
200-250g pasta (depending on your appetite) - we had spirals
Salt

Wash the spinach, and discard any tough stalks. Lift it from the water, cram it into a saucepan, and cover. Put the saucepan over a high heat for a minute. Lift the lid; if the spinach is starting to wilt, stir it so that the leaves at the top hit the boiling liquid at the bottom of the pan. As soon as all the spinach is wilted, drain it. Either leave the spinach to cool and squeeze it dry with your hands, or do your best to push out the liquid with a wooden spoon. Chop up the leaves.

Bring a large pan of water to the boil, throw in a generous portion of salt, throw in the pasta, stir, and simmer at a generous bubble until al dente - just on the firm side of tenderness.

While the pasta is cooking, melt the butter in a saucepan over a low heat, add the garlic, and allow it to cook gently for a minute. Throw in the spinach, ricotta, and cream, stirring and mashing to blend the ingredients. Add salt to taste. Keep stirring over a low heat until warmed through.

Drain the pasta, and toss with the spinach and ricotta. The sauce is quite bland, even with the garlic: you may like to add a little cayenne, or quite a lot of black pepper. It occurs to me now that the sauce would have been enhanced by the grated rind of half a lemon.

Lemon mousse

This mousse is gorgeous. It has a delicious balance of citric acidity and sweetness, as well as a lovely, foamy texture. The trick - not one about which recipes are very helpful - is to blend the gelatinous mixture and the egg white at the right moment. Do it too soon, and the mixture separates and sinks; too late, and the mixture is too well set to be blended.

It is another recipe, following last week's cheesecake, from Reader's Digest's CLASSIC FAVOURITES. The RD version has an extra 125ml of cream, which you're supposed to pipe on top, as well as flaked almonds.

2tsp gelatine
2tbsp water
3 eggs, separated
150g caster sugar
2 lemons, juice and grated rind
125ml double cream

Put the gelatine and water into a small saucepan, and leave to soak for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, combine the egg yolks and sugar in a bowl, and beat them with a wooden spoon until they turn pale yellow. Beat in the lemon juice and rind.

Put the saucepan on to a ring on the hob at its lowest setting. The gelatine mixture may seem thick, but will quickly turn watery. Stir it until all the gelatine has dissolved, and do not allow the mixture to boil - overheating disables its thickening qualities. Add it to the egg and lemon mixture, stirring gently but thoroughly.

You leave this mixture until it starts to set. How long is this? RD does not say. I put mine in the fridge; after just over an hour, it still swirled around as I shifted the bowl, but was no longer runny. I decided that this was the moment. I turned out to be lucky.

Whisk the cream until it thickens, but stop before it becomes stiff – the transition is rapid, so take care. In a separate bowl, and with a separate – or at least clean – whisk, beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks (advice here).). Fold in to the whites the cream and the egg yolk mixture, which should have the consistency of a collapsing jelly. Again, perform the action gently, but do so until the mousse is thoroughly blended.

Spoon the mousse into a bowl, cover with cling film, and refrigerate for at least six hours.

New York cheesecake

I have an amazingly useful Reader's Digest book called CLASSIC FAVOURITES. I say "amazingly" because the book is where I go for every classic recipe, yet appears to be only a slim hardback, at 200 pages.

Finding the recipe and having the ingredients to hand are different matters. So I had to substitute certain ingredients in this New York cheesecake (which the book calls "American cheesecake"). I've marked the heretical ingredients with asterisks, and commented on the RD version below. My method is slightly different, too.

Crust
150g digestive biscuits
50g butter*

Filling
300g ricotta
200g cream cheese**
125g caster sugar
2 eggs, separated
125ml double cream***
2tbsp flour
1tsp vanilla essence
1tsp grated lemon rind (the rind from 1 lemon, roughly)

Blitz the biscuits in a food processor. Melt the butter in a saucepan over a very low heat, and mix in the digestive crumbs.

Spread a little butter on the base of a 24cm cake tin, and place a circle of greaseproof paper on top. (Draw a ring on the paper round the base, and cut along it.) Tip in the crumbs, spread them out, and compact them with the back of a spoon. Put the tin in the fridge for a couple of hours, RD says; I put mine in the freezer.

Blend the cheeses. Beat in the sugar and egg yolks. Stir in the cream (I whipped mine first, until it had started to thicken), flour, vanilla essence and lemon rind. Beat with a wooden spoon until the mixture is smooth. Whisk the egg whites until stiff but not dry (advice here), and fold them gently into the mixture. Pour the mixture on to the crust in the cake tin. Spread smooth.

Put the tin on to a baking sheet (an aid to even heat transmission, some books say), and bake in the centre of a gas mark 4/180C oven for one hour. My cheesecake took an hour and 10 minutes, by which time it was only very slightly wobbly in the centre.

Allow the cake to cool (the picture shows it still in its tin). Then chill it in the fridge. When it's properly chilled, release it from the tin.

The RD cheesecake has a very sweet topping, made from black cherries in syrup, cornflour, lemon juice, and caster sugar. Not my thing.

* RD suggests 200g digestives, so you have enough crumb to spread up the sides of the tin. I'd be likely to make a mess of that job. I've left out the 2tbsp of caster sugar that the book includes in the crumb mix. It suggests 100g butter; but I've come to think that a ratio of 1/3 butter to digestives works fine.

** The recipe has 250g cottage cheese and 250g cream cheese; or 500g cream cheese. Cottage cheese might give a lighter filling.

*** I was disappointed not to have sour cream. I would definitely use that (or creme fraiche) next time.

Victoria sponge

Geraldene Holt's CAKES, from Tom Jaine's Prospect Books, is a lovely book, its loveliness uncompromised by a lack of pictures. Many glossily produced works will fall into disuse while this handsome, authoritative, wide-ranging paperback endures as a kitchen bible.

Here is Holt's recipe for Victoria sponge.

175g butter, at room temperature
175g caster sugar
3 eggs
1/4tsp vanilla essence
175g self-raising flour

Cream the butter and sugar until the mixture is soft and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating them in well. Mix in the vanilla essence. Gradually fold in the flour, sifted. Divide the mixture between two 20cm cake tins, and smooth level.

Put the tins on to a baking sheet, and bake in a pre-heated oven at gas mark 4/180C for 30 minutes, or until the cakes are golden brown and just starting to shrink from the tins. Cool in the tins for 2 minutes; turn out to cool on a wire rack. Spread the filling of your choice on to one of the cakes, and make a sandwich.

Holt advises that you use the base of the tins to draw circles on greaseproof paper. You cut out the discs, butter the bases of the tins, and put the paper on top. You grease the sides of the tins with clarified butter - the solids in unclarified butter, she says, can cause cakes to stick. Not being bothered to prepare clarified butter, I used sunflower oil, spreading it on the tins with a paper towel.

I had one springform tin, and one receptacle made of some rubbery substance, and borrowed from a neighbour. The rubbery version worked fine.

I had no vanilla essence, being able to find only inferior vanilla flavouring (one bottle was sneakily labelled "vanilla flavouring essence") in the shops. I flavoured my sponge with the zest of a whole lemon.

I do not have an electric hand beater, which is supposed to ease the creaming process. I started off by crushing the ingredients with a spoon, and then had a go at them with an electric stick blender. It immediately got clogged, of course. But I think that it did help me to produce a lighter mixture.

Is it necessary to add the eggs gradually to the creamed butter and sugar? You're trying to prevent curdelling. But the flour will do that. I simply chucked in the eggs and the flour all at once. I got a sticky batter. Nigella Lawson (whose version in HOW TO EAT has 225g of butter, sugar and flour (of each of them, that is), with four eggs) says that you want a pouring consistency, and suggests that you add a little milk. But my cakes were spongy enough, I thought.

Lamb stew with aubergines and turnips

Ideally, one should add vegetables to a stew to give them just enough time in which to cook. Incorporating them at the start is a bad idea, because they will be overcooked before the meat is ready. But you cannot be confident of the optimum timing with the aubergines and turnips in this dish. One hour worked for me; but I needed to fiddle around with temperature settings, and to give the stew regular stirs, to ensure that the pot continued simmering and that the vegetables softened evenly.

(I know that carrots are a standard ingredient of many stews, but I don't like using them in this way. Overcooked, as they usually are, they lose all flavour. The exceptions are baby carrots cooked whole in a dish such as poule au pot or bollito misto.)

For 4

750g stewing lamb (I used pieces of middle neck)
Sunflower oil
Salt
2 red onions, roughly chopped
1 head garlic, separated into unpeeled cloves
1 bay leaf
200ml chicken stock
1 large aubergine, cubed
4 small turnips, peeled and sliced, or cut into chunks if you prefer

Coat the lamb in a little sunflower oil, salt it, and brown it quickly on a ridged grill pan (or in a heavy frying pan) over a high heat. Remove to a plate.

Put 2tbsps sunflower oil over a low to medium heat, and soften the onion for 10 minutes or so. Throw in the garlic cloves and bay leaf, and pour in the stock. Put the lamb pieces into the stew. You'll find that the liquid comes about half way up the meat; but after the pot has been in the oven for an hour or so, the meat will probably be submerged. Add more salt, if you like.

I put this dish into the oven for three and a half hours at gas mark S/130C. That setting will cause a stew in my Le Creuset pot to simmer gently. But your oven, and pot, may behave differently.

Stir in the aubergine and turnips with about an hour to go, and bring the stew to a simmering point before returning it to the oven. Turn up the dial temporarily to gas mark 6/200C, until the stew is simmering again - you may be surprised to find, if you have a heavy pot, that even at this setting the stew make take 20 minutes or longer to return to simmering point. Return to gas mark S. Check the ingredients at intervals, stirring them.

I served the stew, with its generous quantity of sauce, in bowls with couscous. So I might have spiced it (along the lines of this version), had there not been objectors to spicy food at the table. For myself, I mixed some of the sauce with harissa.

Chicken salad with yoghurt and pesto

I am not keen on the flavour of bottled pesto, finding it assertively sharp, with the dusty quality of dried herbs. But used in moderation, with other ingredients, it can offer some zing. New potatoes tossed with mayonnaise and no more than a tsp (for four people) of pesto are very nice. Or there's this simple chicken salad, a change from coronation chicken and much quicker to make.

For four people, I poached eight chicken thighs in water in a covered pan for 75 minutes. (I put onion and peppercorns in the poaching water, and kept it for stock.) I shredded the chicken, and allowed it to cool.

I mixed 1 heaped tbsp of Greek yoghurt, 1 heaped tbsp of (bottled) mayonnaise, 1 tsp of pesto, a clove of crushed garlic, some salt, and a squirt of lemon juice. I tossed the chicken in this mixture.

Split mayonnaise

The more experienced I become at making mayonnaise, the more often I mess it up. Complacency is fatal. You really do have to add the oil very gradually, and to make sure that it is properly amalgamated before adding the next drops, until you have used at least half of it. On my first attempts, I was so nervous about separating the mixture that I dripped in the oil with huge restraint and care. Now, I am tempted to think I can get away with splashing it in, and as soon as I do the stiffened mixture in the bowl collapses and turns runny.

These blunders can be repaired, however. Pour the runny mixture into a second bowl. Put another egg yolk into your original bowl, which can have some of the botched mayonnaise adhering to it. Now amalgamate the botched mayonnaise, bit by bit, with the yolk; then start adding oil again. My method is to continue the process until the mayonnaise is too thick to stir, thin it with a little lemon juice or vinegar, and resume pouring in the oil, allowing 150g of oil (mostly sunflower, with about 25g of extra virgin olive) for each yolk.

Mayonnaise recipe

Remarks on the Guardian's recipe

Almond cake

This is a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe from the Guardian (here - scroll down).

My springform cake tin leaks, so I used an ordinary one; it is 22cms, rather than the 25cms Fearnley-Whittingstall asks for. The cake came loose very easily. But what you see here is upside down.

Two observations. Whisking the sugar and egg mixture is quite hard work: the mixture is stiff. Perhaps in part because I used a more narrow tin but also because cakes always seem to take longer than recipes suggest they should, this cake took about 55 minutes to set.

It was good, and stayed moist for several days. I think that it would have been even nicer had I used the zest from 2 lemons.

Sausage casserole with new potatoes and onions

This dish was not entirely successful. I had intended it to be a version of a dish I make with new potatoes, onions, garlic, pancetta, and olive oil: I just mix them all up in a heavy casserole, and cook them at gas mark 6/200C for 30 minutes, and at 4/180C for a further 30 (stirring them up every so often). The onions keep the dish moist; the oil and the fat give it an unctuous quality.

I cooked the substantial quantity in the photo just for myself, with 4 new potatoes (medium-sized), 1 clove of chopped garlic, 2 roughly chopped onions, some salt, 2tbsps of olive oil, and the 3 sausages.

The challenge, I thought, was to brown the sausages without splitting them. I put them on a medium heat with the oil, and kept them moving all the time. They browned quickly. Then I tipped in the other ingredients, stirred everything around, and put the dish in the oven. As you can see, the sausages split anyway, while they were baking. But they didn't impart any flavour to the potatoes and onions. I might as well have fried them separately.

Basic mackerel pate

Not a gourmet recipe, but perfectly nice as a quick lunch.

2 cooked mackerel fillets, skinned and cut into pieces
2tbsp cream cheese
Juice of half a lemon
Cayenne pepper to taste

Whizz the ingredients in a food processor. For quantities such as these, I use the Moulinex in the picture rather than a full-size machine.

Rhubarb sponge

The forced rhubarb that you can still get at the moment is good for crumbles and sponges, because it is tender enough not to require pre-cooking. As you can see, it gives off quite a bit of liquid - but not too much.

The recipe is based on one in a kitchen favourite of mine (and of many others), Margaret Costa's Four Seasons Cookery Book.

450g rhubarb, washed and cut into pieces
55g soft brown sugar
55g butter
55g caster sugar
Rind of 1 orange
1 egg, beaten
85g plain flour

Place the rhubarb in an oven dish, and scatter the sugar on top.

Cream the butter with the caster sugar until soft and pale. Stir in the egg and the flour. (I used gluten-free flour, which gets particularly thick and sticky: I added the best part of a further egg.)

Spread the sponge mixture over the rhubarb. Bake at gas mark 5/190C for about 40 minutes, until the sponge has risen and browned.

Quick stir-fry

A Ripple Farm "stir-fry bag" came in my vegetable box this week. It contained broccoli, a few very thin leaks, and various leafy vegetables I could not identify.

Recipes tell you to heat the oil for stir-fries until it is smoking. Don't, unless you want to consume burnt oil. I put a Le Creuset casserole (I don't own a wok) on a medium heat for a few minutes, before pouring in a couple of tbsps sunflower oil. Immediately, I threw in the washed and drained greenery, and turned up the heat, stirring everything around rapidly until it wilted - no more than a couple of minutes. I stirred in a few shakes of soy sauce, divided the contents of the pan between two plates, and laid sliced goat's cheese on top. That was it.

Oven-baked stews

Certain stews, as I have mentioned before, require very little preparation. You do not need to start by browning the meat, or softening the onions, because the cooking process will perform those functions anyway.

The dish above has three chopped red onions, two red peppers deseeded and chopped into fork-size pieces, and two cloves of finely chopped garlic - all tossed in the dish with two tbsps of olive oil and some salt. The chicken thighs are coated in a little oil and placed on top. I baked the dish for 30 mins at gas mark 6/200C, after which I stirred the onions and peppers, turned the chicken, and lowered the heat to 4/180C. I gave the dish 90 minutes in total, stirring and turning once more after an hour.

Meat will also brown in a covered casserole, if it is not submerged in liquid. Yesterday, I cooked a couple of lamb shanks: three roughly chopped onions, a whole head of garlic separated into cloves, rosemary, bay, and salt, all tossed in a couple of tbsps of oil (sunflower this time). I coated the shanks in oil and laid them on top, with half a chicken stock cube. Gentle cooking: gas mark 2/150C for 90 minutes, until the stew was bubbling, then gas mark S/130C for another 120 minutes - again, I stirred the ingredients and turned the meat from time to time.

'Perfect' rice from the Guardian

I may as well just face it, and admit that I'll never come up with a 100% satisfactory and fool-proof method of cooking rice. Such a method may not exist: the 153 comments below Felicity Cloake's Guardian article on How to cook perfect long grain rice, many of them claiming also to be perfect but giving widely differing instructions, suggest its elusiveness. What of Cloake's "perfect" advice?

She suggests 450g basmati rice for four people. Wash it in a sieve under running water; soak it for 30 minutes; put it in a pan with 585ml water, and salt, on a medium heat; bring to a simmer, cover, and cook on a very low heat for 25 minutes. Place the pan on a wet tea towel, leave for a further five minutes, fluff up the rice, and serve.

I had three reservations about this recipe. The first is that the measurements are unhelpful, unless you want to cook precisely 450g of rice. What you need are proportions, or general guidelines, that work for various quantities. It turns out that 585ml of water is about 1.2 times the volume of the rice; perhaps the more important point is that it covers the rice in the pan with just a mm or two to spare. If you had not pre-soaked and softened the rice, you would need more water than this to cook it.

My second doubt concerns the cooking time. Twenty-five minutes? As many of the comments on the Guardian piece point out, the rice will be cooked in 10 at most. Are the extra 15 minutes required to separate the grains by steaming?

I followed the recipe to the letter. The rice was a little clumpy, but not nearly as clumpy as I had feared; and the grains separated nicely with the addition of sauce. But I think the result would have been better had I switched off the heat after 10 minutes.

Do you need - this is my third doubt - to soak the rice at all? The practice originates in places where rice is not as clean or as carefully sifted as the stuff we buy. Yes, soaking softens the grains; it also leeches nutrients. The only occasions on which I think it is necessary is when you cook the rice with other ingredients, in a pilau, for example. Then, you want to ensure that the rice will cook with just enough water to cover it. Otherwise, the bulk of the ingredients forces you to use too much water in order to ensure that the grains are submerged.

The closest I came to perfection recently was when I reheated rice. Every grain was separate. It explains why Indian restaurants' rice - reheated, for sure - is usually good. So maybe the ideal recipe involves cooking rice in your normal way, tipping it into a foil-lined colander above steaming water, wrapping up the foil, putting a lid on top, and allowing it to steam until you need it. But who can be bothered to do that?