Spiced chicken with yoghurt in a parcel

Another recipe adapted from Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Easy. I doubled the quantities of cumin and coriander, and increased the cooking time.

Serves 4

2tsp cumin seeds
2tsp coriander seeds
2tsp paprika
Cayenne pepper to taste
2 cloves garlic, placed in a mortar with salt and crushed
1 1/2tsp fresh ginger, grated
3tbsp Greek-style yoghurt
2tsp lemon juice or white wine vinegar
Salt to taste
Ground black pepper to taste
8 chicken pieces (thighs and/or drumsticks), skinned

Toast the cumin and coriander over a gentle heat in a small saucepan. Grind them in a mortar. Mix them with all the other ingredients (apart from the chicken) into a paste.

Choose an oven dish large enough to hold the chicken pieces in a single layer. Place in it, overlapping the sides equally, a piece of foil of at least double the size; lay the chicken pieces in it, and smear them all over with the spiced paste. Fold over the foil, and leave for a few hours or longer, refrigerated if necessary.

Bake the dish - still with the chicken enclosed in the foil - at gas mark 4/180C for 90 minutes, turning the chicken pieces once.

As I’ve noted before of a Madhur Jaffrey dish involving yoghurt, the yoghurt splits. No matter: you can spoon the spicy curds over the chicken, and the rest of the sauce around it.

Lamb with yoghurt, cardomom, and ginger

Baked chicken curry

Kerala fish curry

Jerk chicken

Following recipes, I find, is usually a matter of deciding whether I have the ingredients in the house, whether I can do without the ones I’m missing, and whether I can substitute ingredients I do have for ones the writer recommends. I am too mean to buy items such as allspice berries especially for one dish, because I reckon that the packet may go to waste before I need them again.

Another consideration when adapting Felicity Cloake’s ‘Perfect’ jerk chicken from the Guardian is what high heat does to sugar. The chicken illustrated in the piece is blackened. (I know: the pieces illustrated above look pretty dark; but the photograph has exaggerated the colour.) Soy sauce by itself tends to caramelise, and can burn; sugar will ensure that you get chicken with a burned exterior, particularly if you cook it on the barbecue.

Like many of the recipes involving chillis on this blog, this serves one – the other members of my family would not enjoy it. But the quantities in the marinade may of course be adjusted upwards.

1 spring onion, cut into pieces
2 scotch bonnet chillis, pith (which, rather than the seeds, is the hottest part) removed
1 clove of garlic, cut into pieces
1tsp fresh ginger
1/4tsp allspice
Sprinkling of cinnamon
A couple of gratings of nutmeg
Ground black pepper (to taste)
Salt (to taste)
1tsp soy sauce
1dstsp white wine vinegar (or lemon or lime juice)
1dstsp sunflower oil
2 chicken thighs

Put the spring onion, chillis, garlic, and ginger into an electric vegetable mill. (A food processor is likely to be too large for this modest quantity.) Whizz. You don’t need to create a slush, but can have a mixture in which little pieces of the vegetables are distinct. Stir in the other ingredients, apart from the chicken.

Put the chicken into a bowl or oven dish, and spread the jerk marinade all over it, including under the skin. Leave “for at least six hours”, Cloake says; I left mine for three.

It’s certainly not worth starting a barbecue for one person. I prefer to bake/roast chicken rather than to grill it, liking it tender. So in order to avoid charring the skin, I cooked it covered with foil for an hour at gas mark 4/180C, before uncovering it.

Of course, when I uncovered the dish, I found that my chicken thighs were swimming in liquid. Not to worry: I poured this sauce into a small pan, returned the chicken to the oven, and boiled the sauce until it had a syrupy consistency. Then I spread this syrup on to the chicken, and cooked it, uncovered, for a further 15 minutes, until the marinade had caramelised slightly.

You can never be certain, until you eat them, how hot chillis will be. These were just right. Their zingy heat, combined with the spicy, sour sweetness of the other ingredients, was delicious.

Dhal 2

Many recipes for curries suggest you make the sauce with water, and sometimes quite a lot of it, rather than stock. I have always been a little dubious about this, and have even sinned against authenticity by using a stock cube – or rather half of a cube – in order to add a body of savoury flavour. But perhaps water allows the spices to express themselves with a little more freshness. It certainly did in this dhal, which I made just for myself. You could, of course, adjust the quantities as appropriate.

100g red lentils
Water
1tsp turmeric
1/4tsp cayenne pepper
1tbsp creamed coconut
1tsp cumin seeds
1tsp coriander seeds
5 cardamom pods
5 black peppercorns
Sunflower oil
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1/2tsp ginger, minced
Salt

Wash and rinse the lentils. Put them in a small saucepan with water to cover, the turmeric, cayenne, and coconut. Bring to the boil and simmer, covered. Check them frequently: they absorb water readily, and may need more. The aim is to achieve the consistence of thick soup once they are soft, after about 20 minutes. Uncover the pan if the consistency is too runny.

Meanwhile, put the cumin, coriander, cardamom, and black pepper into a small saucepan on a gentle heat. Cook until they give off a toasty aroma. Grind the spices in a mortar.

Warm a tbsp or two of sunflower oil in a heavy-bottomed pan, throw in the onions and garlic, and fry until the onions are soft, yellow, and sweet. Add more oil if they threaten to catch. Add the ground spices, and fry for about five minutes longer, again ensuring that they don’t catch. Add the garlic, and cook for a further minute.

Tip the lentils into the spiced onions, add salt to taste, and simmer for a minute longer. Finish the dish with a squeeze of lemon or lime juice, if you like.

Dhal

Harissa 3

I have found a delicious harissa, called Alfez. It has all the heat you could want, but is tangy as well: the flavours of the spices and of the acidic ingredients come through.

According to the ingredients list, chillis account for only about 15% of the total mixture.

Here, loosely based on the Alfez formula, is a version I made. I measured by desert spoonfuls. But of course larger or small measures would be fine.

1dstsp cumin seeds
1dstsp coriander seeds
1dstsp caraway seeds
1.5dstsp tomato puree
2dstsp dried chillis
2 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1/2tsp cayenne pepper
1/2tsp sugar
2dstsp olive oil
1dstsp white wine vinegar
1dstsp lime juice

Toast the cumin, coriander, and caraway in a dry saucepan over a gentle heat. Grind in a mortar.

Put the spices, with all the other ingredients, into a small blender, and whizz. Add a little more lime juice, or water, if you need to loosen the texture.

Keep the mixture in a clean jar in the fridge, with a layer of oil covering the surface.

Harissa 1

Harissa 2

Carrot hummus

This is delicious. Try it, and you may abandon the chick pea version for a while.

The recipe is a scaled-down adaptation of one by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the Guardian. But I’ve added spices, along the lines of a carrot dip recipe of his from a couple of years ago. In other respects, his newer version appears to be an improvement, because the roasted carrots have a stronger, sweeter flavour than do the boiled ones.

4 carrots, peeled and cut into fork-sized chunks
1 clove garlic
1tbsp olive oil
Salt
1dstp tahini paste*
1tsp coriander seeds
1/2tsp caraway seeds
Cayenne pepper to taste
1tbsp orange juice

Put the carrots and garlic in an oven dish, and toss with the oil and salt. Bake, uncovered, at gas mark 6/200C, tossing the ingredients again after 20 minutes. The carrots may need longer to soften than the 30-35 minutes that Fearnley-Whittingstall specifies.

Toast the coriander and caraway over a low heat in a small saucepan. Grind in a mortar.

Slipping the garlic from its skin first, tip the contents of the oven dish into a food processor or small electric mill. Add the tahini, coriander and caraway, cayenne, and orange juice. Whizz. Add a little more juice if you need to loosen the texture.

*Apologies to those who read this recipe when I first posted it: I forgot this vital ingredient.

Carbonata

This dish comes from a 1990 BBC book, Italian Regional Cookery by Valentina Harris, and must be related to the Flemish and French carbonnade, which is often made with beer. Harris says that the Italian version is “absolutely typical” of the Aosta Valley in the north west. She specifies a “very heavy, strong red wine”; I used a nero d’avola, from Sicily.

The technique Harris gives appears to resemble that for a risotto: you add the liquid - wine, in this case - in stages. I write “appears” because she does not tell you whether to cover the casserole, instead saying that you simmer the stew until the wine “has been absorbed”, before adding more. But absorption is not what happens: meat as it cooks expels liquid rather than absorbing it. Rather, the wine evaporates. So my conclusion is that you need to cook the stew in an uncovered dish.

The problem is that, because the meat has not been entirely submerged in liquid for the two hours’ cooking time, it may still be tough. At this point, I moistened the stew with a little stock, and put it in the oven, covered, for a further hour.

The flour creates another problem, thickening the liquid and causing it to stick as it simmers. You need to stir the stew regularly.

I tend not to put flour in stews. The next time I cook carbonata, I shall leave it out, but include another onion or two. I’ll let the winey sauce evaporate until it thickens with the onions, before putting the stew into the oven for the last hour.

In the following recipe, the technique for searing the meat and the oven cooking both differ from Harris’s version. The star anise is my idea, too.

800g chuck steak, cubed
3tbsp flour
1tbsp sunflower oil
Butter
1 large onion, sliced
1 bottle red wine
½ star anise
Salt
Stock or water

In a bowl, toss the steak with the flour. Then toss it with the oil, adding a little more if you need it to coat all the chunks of meat.

Get a ridged grill pan very hot. Brown the meat on it in batches, turning once. Return the meat to the bowl when done.

In a heavy casserole and over a low heat, soften the onion in just enough butter to prevent pieces of onion from sticking and catching. Adding a little oil may help.

Tip the meat, with any juices, into the casserole, add salt and star anise, and pour in enough wine just to cover the ingredients. Bring to a simmer, and cook in the uncovered casserole over a gentle heat, stirring regularly. As the liquid diminishes, add more wine.

Continue for two hours, allowing the liquid to reduce down at the end. Add just enough stock or water to create as much sauce as you’d like, and put the casserole into a gas mark S/130C oven for a further hour.

Harris says that you might serve this dish with polenta or with jacket potatoes. I chose rice.

Potatoes in olive oil

This is from a recipe I found in the Week, for squid and potatoes. The magazine took it from Canal House Cooking by Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton.

The recipe gives 2 large russet potatoes, peeled and cut crosswise into approx 5cm slices; 1 onion, sliced; 125ml olive oil; and 125ml of water.

The first thing you notice is the 5cm instruction: 5cm is not a slice, it’s a chunk. The second is that 125ml is an awful lot of oil. The third is that the recipe tells you to put all the ingredients in a heavy frying pan over a medium heat, cover, and cook for 30 minutes. A medium setting on your hob will almost certainly get these ingredients bubbling too fiercely; and 30 minutes is almost certainly longer than they will take to cook.

In spite of my doubts, I gave the recipe a try, but with less oil and more potatoes, cut into 1cm slices; I also added salt, which the recipe does not mention. You’ll need a waxy variety of potato: piled up in the pan, sitting above the liquid and with unequal access to the steam, they cook unevenly, and maincrop varieties will collapse under the treatment - especially if you need to lift the lid at the end and turn up the heat to evaporate the remaining liquid. I thought that even my Jerseys were more beaten up than ideal. But, having absorbed a good deal of oil, they were flavoursome.

Coronation chicken - an alternative

Easier than coronation chicken, and just as nice.

1.5kg chicken, roasted and shredded
170g Greek yoghurt
2tbsp mayonnaise
2tsp harissa, or other hot sauce, or pesto
1 clove garlic, chopped and crushed with a little salt
Salt and pepper

Mix the chicken with the other ingredients.

Katherine Hepburn's chocolate brownies

Yes, this recipe is ascribed to THE Katherine Hepburn, the one who, as pub quiz enthusiasts may know, won a record four Best Actress Oscars. At first sight, it appears to have far too little chocolate, and a surprisingly modest amount of flour. But it produces delicious, fudgy results, albeit - as you can see - somewhat crumbly ones.

The espresso that I included features in only one online version, and may not be canonical.

50g dark chocolate (70% cocoa or more)
120g butter
200g sugar (I used caster; some recipes specify granulated)
1tsp vanilla essence
2tbsp brewed espresso coffee
2 eggs, beaten
45g plain flour
Pinch of salt
Handful of chopped walnuts (optional)

In a small saucepan, melt the chocolate and butter over a very gentle heat, stirring all the time. Take the pan off the heat as soon as you think the mixture is hot enough to melt any remaining solids.

Pour the chocolate mixture over the sugar in a bowl, and stir, adding the vanilla and espresso. Stir in the eggs, flour, salt, and walnuts, if using. (I am not sure why you need the salt. It does promote the development of gluten, so may help the brownies to cohere – but perhaps not in this small amount.)

You’re supposed to bake the mixture (at 170C), which is almost alarmingly runny, in a lined (with greaseproof paper), 8” (20cm), square tin. I had only a round, 23cm tin, and my brownies were too thin. They took about 40 minutes.

Bee Wilson: Please, less chocolate in my brownies! (Telegraph)

Spaghetti carbonara

Felicity Cloake's instructions on "How to cook the perfect spaghetti carbonara" look pretty good to me. My version has only slight differences - matters of preference rather than disagreement.

I'd use just two eggs, not bothering with the extra yoke. And I'd probably use a bit more pancetta, because I like it so much.

I'd put just a tiny bit of oil in a pan, and fry the pancetta with the clove of garlic, cut in half; I'd fish out the garlic later. The point is not to have to start with a tbsp of oil, because the pancetta will give off a lot of fat of its own.

If the pancetta is cooked before your pasta is ready, turn off the heat. But turn it back on again as you're about to drain the pasta. Toss the pasta and the pancetta in the hot pan, and turn off the heat again. The contents should be able to curdle the eggs, but not so hot that they stick.

I prefer to keep the eggs and the cheese separate. Tip the eggs over the spaghetti and pancetta, toss until the strands of pasta are coated with curdled egg, and then toss with the cheese.

I like the idea of taking a cup of cooking water from the pasta pan. I've always kept some of the water by draining the pasta over the pan. But it's easier to control the quantity if you pour from a cup - an important advantage when all you need is just enough to loosen the texture.

Guardian blog

"The great recipe swindle", the headline on this blog I wrote for the Guardian, may be putting my argument a bit strongly. Still, the piece attracted more than 200 comments. Very few of them gave me a hard time: considering the overheated atmosphere that can prevail in such fora, I feel that I got away unscathed.

Perhaps it was my good luck that many of the posters ended up arguing with each other, particularly about how to cook rice. It is a subject that I have explored somewhat obsessively here, as the link on the right demonstrates.

Don't Sweat the Aubergine - pastry

A third and final extract from the new edition of my book Don't Sweat the Aubergine.

Pastry

The first edition of this book contained no recipe for pastry. The reason for the omission was personal: I am hopeless at making it. I did not feel that I could, in good faith, offer advice on the subject.
 
I am not dextrous. My efforts at woodwork at school were a jumble of ill-fitting joints, and my Airfix models were encrusted with surplus glue and misapplied paint. Today, I am incapable of wrapping a present without scrunching up the paper, or of folding a shirt without leaving it in need of another go with the iron. And I cannot rub fat into flour efficiently. When I try to roll pastry, I always get it stuck to the rolling pin and to the table, and end up with an uneven, glutenous slab with holes and ragged edges.

I can still make a tart, though. A food processor does the work of my incompetent fingers (though the machine has potential disadvantages – see below), and, leaving the rolling pin in its drawer, I simply spread the dough (as recommended by Elizabeth David), or grate it (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall).

HOW TO MAKE IT
(For a 23cm tin)
140g plain flour
70g butter
About 2tbsp iced water

Cut the butter into small pieces, and put it back into the fridge for 30 minutes. You could put the flour in its bowl there too.1 – see why you do it

Tip the flour and butter into a food processor. On a medium speed, whizz the ingredients, in short bursts, until the butter is blended and the mixture has the consistency of breadcrumbs.2 (Or, if you prefer, carry out this process with your fingertips.)

Tip this mixture back into the chilled bowl in which you had held the flour. 1tbsp at a time, sprinkle over the water, lifting and blending the mixture gently until it coheres; or stir it into shape gently with a knife.3 Put it back into the fridge, wrapped in clingfilm if you want to protect it from the odours of other foods, for another 30 minutes.4

A loose-bottomed tin will enable you to transfer the cooked tart to a plate. Grease it with a little olive or vegetable oil – the solids in butter can cause sticking. Spread the pastry by hand over the bottom and sides of the tin; or grate it into the tin, and smooth it out.

Prick the pastry with a fork, lay foil or kitchen paper on top, and weigh down this covering – with baking beans, or with uncooked rice, or, as I do, with another tin of the same size. Cook the pastry “blind” (without a filling) in a gas mark 6/200°C oven for 15 minutes; remove the weight and the foil or paper, and continue to cook until the pastry loses all tackiness. Now it is ready for your filling.5

Why you do it
1) Cold ingredients. The trick in pastry-making is to minimise the creation of gluten - the rubbery, tough protein that forms when molecules in starch granules bond, with the help of water. “Shortening” – a fat such as butter or lard – coats the grains of flour, repels water, and inhibits these chains of molecules from forming. A low temperature also inhibits gluten formation. The recipe includes no salt, you’ll notice: salt “greatly strengthens the gluten network”, Harold McGee warns.

2) Machine or hand? I use the machine, because I tend to botch the hand-rubbing. But it has drawbacks. The vigorous beating can cause the water in the butter to hydrate the starch, creating gluten, as can the heating of the rapidly whirring blade. I try to minimise these effects by using the motor in short bursts. Lard, if you’d like to use it, has a lower water content.

3) Adding the water gradually, and gently. This is a delicate stage of the process: you’re introducing an ingredient that will cause gluten to form if handled insensitively. Do not pour water through the spout of the processor. As the ball coheres, it will be kneaded by the blade. Kneading is fine for bread, but not for pastry.

4) Resting. Even with your delicate handling, the dough has developed some lengthier protein molecules. During the next 30 minutes or so, they will relax.

5) Blind baking. Margaret Costa’s Four Seasons Cookery Book is a wonderful work, but offers bad advice in suggesting you pour your tart filling into a case of raw dough. You end up with a soggy crust. When baking blind, you prick the pastry and weigh it down because it can buckle as the water in it steams.

Don't Sweat the Aubergine - sponge cakes

A second extract from the new edition of my book Don't Sweat the Aubergine. The first edition gave no cake recipes, largely because I'm an inexperienced and inexpert baker. But it struck me that a book that purports to tell you how and why things work in the kitchen ought to have a section on this branch of cookery, in which, you could argue, some knowledge of the technicalities is particularly important.

I start with a bit of theory, and follow with three basic sponge recipes.

Sponge cakes

If a net is, according to Samuel Johnson, “holes tied together with string”, a cake may be described as bubbles contained by batter. You create the bubbles in three principal ways:

Beating (creaming) butter and sugar
Incorporating a raising agent, either by using self-raising flour or by adding baking powder (and/or, in some recipes, bicarbonate of soda, an ingredient of baking powder)
Creating an egg foam

The recipes here involve various permutations of these methods. But let’s start with the technical stuff, some of which applies not only to cakes but to other sweet things in this chapter.

HOW/WHY YOU DO IT
1) Equipment. Springform cake tins of 20cms and 23cms will cover a good many recipes. If you’re making a sponge sandwich, you’ll need two 20cm tins.

2) Lining and greasing the tin. Place the 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. Oil works better than butter as a non-stick agent, because the solids in butter can be adhesive.

3) Creaming. Generations of (mostly) schoolgirls suffered arm ache as they spent domestic science lessons – as they used to be known - mashing margarine, butter or some other shortening ingredient into sugar, and laboriously working away at the mixture until it lightened. These days, chefs tend to use hand-held mixers or food processors. Both machines require some manual intervention during the creaming process, because the mixture clogs up until it becomes properly amalgamated.

A creamed butter/sugar mixture, the texture of double cream, contains lots of air bubbles. It also separates the grains of flour, preventing lumps. This is why fats are known as “shortenings”: they interrupt the formation of gluten, which is a long chain of protein molecules.

4) Sifting flour. Unnecessary, despite what recipes may say. You are unlikely to find weevils left behind in your sieve; and any airiness you give to the flour now will be lost when you stir it into the batter.

5) Separating an egg. Crack the egg on the edge of a bowl, and allow the white to pour in. Gently, with your hand held over the bowl and your fingers straight, tip the yolk on to your fingers, opening them slightly to allow further white to slip through. Moving the yolk from hand to hand can encourage this process. (I got this technique from the opening sequence of a TV biopic of Elizabeth David.)

6) Whisking whites. Try to avoid letting any trace of yolk creep into the egg white. Don’t add salt or, despite what some experts recommend, lemon juice or vinegar: they soften egg whites.

I use a hand-held whisk, feeling that, in spite of the work involved, it enables me more accurately to judge the progress of the foam.

Use a large bowl, and tip it towards you, so that the whisk gets access to as much egg white as possible. You should stop beating when the whisk, lifted from the foam, creates peaks, which do not subside. It’s tempting to carry on, just to make sure you’ve got the right consistency. Resist. Further beating causes the peak stage rapidly to be succeeded by collapse.

7) Dropping the cake. In The Science of Cooking, Peter Barham offers the bizarre recommendation that, on removing the cake from the oven, you drop it from a height of about 30cms on to a hard surface. (An average ruler is about 30cms long.) 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.

8) Turning out. Some recipes recommend that you wait five minutes, just long enough for the cake to contract from the side of the tin, before turning it out on to a wire rack. If you do this, place the cake top-side (the firmer one) down. I find that bits of cake stick to the rack anyway, and I usually allow the cake to cool in the tin.

Basic sponge
This sponge does contain a certain amount of gluten, which you create when you blend the flour with the sugar and butter, and when you stir in the eggs. If you have ever handled bread dough, which has a lot of gluten, you’ll know that it has an elastic quality. Here, that elasticity maintains the structure of the cake as the air bubbles expand. If the structure were to break and the bubbles to pop, the cake would collapse. The texture of the cake is, nevertheless, foamy.

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.

Line and grease a 20cm springform cake tin.2 – SEE HOW/WHY YOU DO IT, ABOVE

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 – I like it, but you may prefer less, or none at all) and a portion of the egg. Keep adding egg until you have a gloopy batter; it should drop off a spoon, but reluctantly. Don’t feel obliged to use all the egg; but, if you have done so before you get to the gloopy stage, add a little milk too.

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

Drop the cake tin from a height of about 30cms on to a hard surface (I hope the spring is secure).7 Allow the cake to cool before turning it out.8 I keep it in greaseproof paper, wrapped inside foil.

VARIATIONS
Add the zest of a lemon, or of an orange, to the mix. And/or poppy seeds. Or any other dry flavourings.

Make a sandwich: double the ingredients, and divide the batter between two tins, baking the layers side by side.

Fillings. You might go for a cream tea theme, with a layer of jam topped by whipped cream. Or try lemon curd, from Geraldine Holt’s Cakes: 1 lemon; 60g caster sugar; 1/4tsp cornflour; 1 egg; 30g butter. Use a small bowl that will rest in a saucepan of simmering water without the base touching the water’s surface. Grate in the lemon zest, and add the juice too, along with the sugar, cornflour, and egg. Cook the mixture, stirring all the time, above the simmering water. After about five to seven minutes, the mixture should start to thicken. Remove the bowl, and stand it in cold water; while the mixture still has some warmth, stir in the butter in small pieces. Allow the curd to cool before spreading it on the cake.

Victoria sponge
The same ingredients as above, but, you’ll notice, in a different order. Creaming the butter and sugar before adding the egg and gently folding in the flour results in a cake that is lighter in gluten, and that therefore has a lighter texture. The drawback is that the air bubbles are more likely to burst in the less elastic batter, particularly if your mixture is too loose.

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

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

Line and grease a 20cm springform cake tin.2 – SEE HOW/WHY YOU DO IT, P000

Cream the sugar and butter until the mixture is soft and fluffy.3 Beat in about three quarters of the egg – this may be enough. Add the vanilla, if you’re using it, and gently fold in the flour. You should have a gloopy batter, which will drop off a spoon, but reluctantly. If the batter is too stiff, gently add more egg. If it’s still too stiff, add a little milk.

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

Drop the cake tin from a height of about 30cms on to a hard surface.7 Allow the cake to cool before turning it out.8 I keep it in greaseproof paper, wrapped inside foil.

VARIATIONS
See the suggestions below the basic sponge recipe, p000. Here’s an extra one: lemon drizzle. Put the zest and juice of two lemons in a bowl, and stir in 100g granulated sugar until dissolved. When you remove the cake from the oven, spoon this syrup all over it.

Genoese sponge
In this sponge, the eggs produce the foam – there is no other raising agent. A cake the size of the sponges described above would again have 100g of flour and 100g of sugar, but with four eggs, and 50g melted butter. You need an electric whisk to beat together the sugar and eggs; eventually, after a good 10 minutes and maybe more, they increase in volume by as much as six times, and become stiff and very pale. Then you fold in the flour. Last (because the fat collapses the air bubbles), you stir in the butter, quickly transfer the batter to the tin, and bake it as in the recipes above.

Don't Sweat the Aubergine - aubergines

A revised, updated edition of my cookbook, Don't Sweat the Aubergine, comes from Black Swan on 26th April. Here it is, on the publisher's website. And here is what I have to say in the book about aubergines.

Aubergines

Nowhere in the literature of cookery is the sway of received ideas more evident than in the treatment of aubergines. Routinely, recipes advise you that aubergines should be salted, rinsed and dried before cooking. You leave them, sprinkled with salt, in a colander, perhaps with a plate on top to squeeze them a little, for half an hour or so; or, more rarely, you use the technique given in Classic Turkish Cookery by Ghillie Basan, who suggests you soak aubergine cubes or slices in salted water. Recipes may add the gloss that the point of the exercise is "to remove the bitter juices".

Once upon a time, it seems, aubergines were bitter. Some varieties still are, no doubt. But I’ve never found one. In any event, salting probably does not remove bitterness: it disguises it (cf McGee on Food and Cooking).

Supporters of salting who acknowledge the lack of bitterness in modern strains of aubergine advance a second reason for the practice: that pre-salted aubergines do not soak up so much oil when you fry them. It is true that unsalted aubergines soak up all the oil you give them as soon as they touch it. But salted ones soak up quite a lot too; and, if you have cut the vegetable into cubes and are stirring them around, the flesh soon starts sticking to the pan. Stuck bits apart, the cubes are usually still firm after the 10 minutes that recipes tend to give as the cooking time. Aubergine is not nice unless it is soft.

Delia Smith says that pre-salting concentrates the flavour, ensuring that the cooked aubergine won't be watery. I experimented. I pre-salted the cubes of half an aubergine; then I baked it with the cubes of the other half, salted only as I put them in the oven. I tasted each kind. There was no difference between them.

HOW TO COOK THEM

Cut aubergines into cubes. Put them on a baking tray or in a roasting pan, and pour olive oil or sunflower oil over them - about 1 tbsp for each medium-sized aubergine. Add salt, and pepper if you like. Toss with spoons, or with your hands. Cook at gas mark 6/200°C for 20 minutes to half an hour, or until tender.

Recipes such as Parmigiana di melanzane and moussaka require rounds (cut into 1/2cm discs horizontally) or slices (cut the aubergine in two horizontally, then cut 1/2cm vertical slices), according to your preference. Brush them with olive or sunflower oil (if you don't have a pastry brush, pour some oil into a small saucer, dip a fork into it, and brush the aubergine slices with the backs of the tines), season, and bake as above.

VARIATIONS

You can brush slices of aubergine with oil and cook them in a frying pan or a ridged grill pan, or on a barbecue. But I like the flesh of my aubergines to have a melting texture; and I find that texture harder to achieve by frying or grilling than by baking. Frying cubes of aubergine is, in my experience, very unsatisfactory: as I say above, the cubes soak up all the oil, stick to the pan, and take ages to tenderise. However, you can cook them in an pan on the hob if it also contains onions, which provide a moist environment. Cook the onions in oil first for about five minutes, tip in the aubergines with some salt, stir everything around, and cover. Cook on the lowest heat, stirring regularly. The aubergines should be tender in 15 to 20 minutes.

Another way of cooking aubergines is to bake them in their skins, then to mash up the flesh with garlic, oil, lemon, salt and any other flavourings you fancy. Tahini, the sesame paste with the consistency of peanut butter, works well. I like a dash of cayenne or chilli pepper. Cumin, dry roasted in a pan until it gives off a toasty aroma and then ground in a mill or mortar, is also nice. One clove of garlic, finely chopped or mashed, for each aubergine; 1tbsp of tahini; 1tbsp olive oil; 1tbsp of lemon juice; 1tsp of cumin seeds.

There’s a neat way of baking aubergines in Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Heaven. You slice the aubergine in half, slash the flesh, sprinkle one half with garlic, add oil, seasoning and, in his recipe, a sprig of rosemary, put the halves together and wrap them tightly in foil, bake at 220°C (gas mark 7) for 45 minutes, then at 110°C (gas mark 1/4) for a further 25 minutes (the aim is to get the flesh really soft). You scoop the flesh (discarding the rosemary, which will have imparted its flavour) into a pan. Then, Ramsay says, you heat it to evaporate the liquid and to achieve a thick, creamy consistency. So Ramsay clearly doesn’t think the juices will be bitter: this technique will concentrate them.

My one variation on Ramsay’s method is to add the oil at the end of cooking, in order to get its full flavour.

My favourite aubergine dish is Parmigiana di melanzane. You slice and bake the aubergines as in HOW TO COOK THEM above, layer them in a dish with tomato sauce (it doesn't matter whether you end up with tomato or aubergines or a mixture on top), put chopped mozzarella on top and grated Parmesan on top of that, then bake at, say, gas mark 4/180°C to blend the flavours and brown the cheese. It's delicious hot, even more delicious at room temperature, and most delicious lukewarm.

Fried chicken - without egg

I read somewhere that it was a solecism, when making southern fried chicken, to dip the chicken in egg before coating it in flour. Flour only, is the rule. I have indeed found that the crusts of my egg/flour fried chicken have been somewhat stodgy.

The coating above consists only of gluten-free flour - which I have found, when making onion bhajis, produces better results than wheat flour – seasoned with salt and a generous quantity of cayenne pepper. I put sunflower oil to a 1cm depth in a frying pan, warmed it over a low to medium heat until a small piece of bread sizzled in it, and fried the chicken pieces with the flame turned right down for 30 minutes, turning once. It was the best I've made.

Baked salmon with soy and lemon

Baking salmon steaks, or indeed any fish, is a lot easier than frying or grilling them. Ten minutes in a gas mark 6/200C oven left these steaks tender and juicy. They are anointed with slivers of butter, salt and pepper, and soy sauce. I squeezed over some lemon juice at the end.

Onion bhajis

These bhajis are adapted from an Angela Hartnett recipe in the Guardian. I made two bhajis with plain flour (which she suggests), and two with gluten-free flour. The gluten-free versions - perhaps gram flour would have been even better - were far superior: wheat flour produced a stodgy, crusty texture. I used more spice than the pinches Hartnett suggests.

1 onion, cut in half, sliced into half-moons, then quarter-moons
30g gluten-free flour
1/2tsp cumin seeds
1/2tsp coriander seeds
Pinch cayenne pepper
Salt
1 egg, beaten
200ml sunflower or groundnut oil

Warm the cumin and coriander in a small saucepan over a low heat, until they give off a spicy aroma. Grind them in a mortar.

In a bowl, mix the onion, flour, spices, and salt to taste. Gradually add the egg, stirring or mixing by hand until you have just enough to produce a squidgy and coherent mass. Divide it into four bhajis.

Warm the oil over a medium heat in a saucepan or frying pan. Put in a small piece of bread: if it sizzles, gently lower in the bhajis. Fry until brown, turning once.

Lambs' liver and onions

I asked the price of calves' liver at my local butcher. £24 a kilo. The lambs' liver? £4.90. Choosing between them did not take very long. The quantity below, plenty for two people, cost less than £1.50.

Olive oil
4 red onions, sliced
Salt
1tbsp red wine vinegar
275g lambs' liver, cut into fork-sized slices
Handful of flat leaf parsley, chopped

Warm about 3tbsp of oil in a heavy casserole over a very low heat, and throw in the onions with half a tsp of salt. Stir, and cover. Continue to cook gently for 45 minutes to one hour, stirring regularly at first to ensure that the onions do not catch. You should find that as they collapse they throw off enough liquid in which to stew. (If not, add a tbsp or two of water or stock.) Indeed, you may find that there is too much liquid, in which case you can encourage it to evaporate by uncovering the pot.

Once you have a pot full of soft, sweet onions, moist rather than runny, add the vinegar and allow it to evaporate for a couple of minutes. (It is pretentious to call this, as some do, an onion "confit", because no preservation - the process that the name implies - is involved.)

If you were cooking calves' liver, you would flash-fry it in butter in a separate pan, stir it into the onions, and serve immediately. But you may want to cook lambs' liver slightly more thoroughly. Simply stir it into the onions, cover the casserole again, and stew for about 10 minutes, or until cooked through but still tender. Stir in the parsley, and serve.

You may want to add black pepper with the liver. Or you could go for a goulash theme, adding a tbsp of paprika once the onions have collapsed, with a dollop or two of sour cream stirred in at the end.

Bean salad

Tinned beans have a somewhat mealy texture. Dried beans would be better here; but you're not likely to want to go to the trouble of preparing them if all you're making is a light lunch.

1 tin cannellini beans, drained
4 spring onions, sliced and soaked in boiling water for about 15 minutes (the water tames their acidity), drained
Handful of Greek-style black olives, pitted
Handful of flat-leaf parsley, washed and chopped
Black pepper

Vinaigrette
1dstsp red or white wine vinegar
Salt
1/5tsp honey
1/4tsp Dijon mustard
2tsp sunflower oil
1tsp extra virgin olive oil

Put the salad ingredients into a bowl.

I usually make my vinaigrette in a jar. Put in the vinegar, add salt to taste, and the honey and mustard. Stir to dissolve them. Add the oils, put on the lid, and shake the jar to amalgamate the dressing.

Pour the dressing over the salad, and toss.

Kerala fish curry

Adapted from Madhur Jaffrey's Curry Easy. Jaffrey suggests sea bass; I used cheap white fish - pouting, and a bit of hake. I didn't want to use only 120ml of coconut milk - what was I to do with the rest of the tin? So my dish includes creamed coconut, which gives the sauce a slightly powdery, but not unpleasant, texture.

For 2.

300-350g white fish, cut into fork-sized pieces
Salt
2tbsp olive or sunflower oil
2 banana shallots, sliced
2tsp grated ginger (double the quantity that Jaffrey gives)
1 clove garlic, chopped
200ml water
50g creamed coconut
1/2tsp ground turmeric
Cayenne pepper to taste
Ground black pepper to taste
1tbsp paprika
1tbsp lemon juice

Sprinkle 1/2 tsp salt over the fish, and toss. (I suppose that the salt is meant to draw out some of the liquid.)

Put the oil into a saucepan or casserole dish and set over a medium heat. Throw in the shallots, and fry, stirring very regularly, until bits of them turn brown. Add the ginger and garlic, and cook for a further minute. Add all the other ingredients, bring to a simmer, and continue to simmer with the pan covered for 15 minutes.

Add the fish, and stir it thoroughly into the stew. No need to turn up the heat again; simply cover the pan. The fish may well be cooked through after five minutes.

This curry is delicious: creamy, but with the creaminess cut by the peppers, ginger, and lemon juice.