Kathryn cooks with Jamie

Simple Baked Lasagne

2007-03-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

I know lasagne is a bit past it, in culinary terms; it's had its hey-day and now nobody serves lasagne at dinner parties anymore, even the pseudo-exotic Mediterranean vegetable variety. Still, regardless of passing trends, I continue to cook lasagne. I've tried quite a few versions of the ragu sauce that is its base and several different cheese or bechamel sauces; I've made it using my own freshly-made lasagne sheets, Tesco's 'fresh' lasagne sheets and dried lasagne sheets from a box. My favourite lasagne, however, still comes from Jamie's Dinners, the book that accompanied the TV show where he changed the fate of school dinners, except that the book came out before the television series and bore little relation to it. This book has mixed reviews, as I understand it, but it has some old faithfuls in it for me, and some recipes with a new twist. The slow-cooked lamb, turned the second night into shepherds pie; the fish with Parmesan crust; the lamb cutlets with basil sauce; the quesadillas with guacamole; the burger; the chicken tikka masala that is unbelievably easy and good... Oh and the simple baked lasagne, which is simple, but has a layer of butternut squash in it, that lifts it way above the ordinary.

Lasagne, to me, is comfort food; it is out of place in the summer, even a British summer, but it is incredibly warming in the autumn and winter. I realized I hadn't yet made lasagne this winter - thanks to the Jamie project - and set about rectifying that. Jamie's ragu sauce includes pancetta, beef and pork mince, cinnamon, onions, garlic, carrots, celery, tinned plum tomatoes, red wine or water. I left it to simmer away in the slow cooker yesterday while we went to Durham with my parents (back from Gran Canaria and unapologetically brown). I don't cook the lasagne quite as Jamie suggests (he lines the oven dish with pasta, and uses more layers than me), but I do include his layer of butternut squash, first roasted in the oven with crushed dried red chilli, coriander seed and black pepper. I also use his version of white sauce (creme fraiche with anchovies chopped into it and grated Parmesan), and, as suggested, tear mozzarella over the top. I recommend this over boring bechamel (which isn't to denigrate bechamel, particularly - I make it in other lasagnes and it's nice, really; this is just easier and really nice).

I watched part of an episode of Nigella Bites earlier, the one where she cooks to commemorate the past, her grandmother, her mother, her sister Thomasina, and where she makes liptauer. I recall my friend Victoria's verdict when Nigella's children dive into the fridge at the end of the programme and gobble up the liptauer: 'what did she bribe them with to get them to eat that?' I have never made liptauer and am sure it's really good, but it doesn't appear, at any rate, particularly child-friendly. Or else her children have better taste than most (which is obviously possible). Nigella also deep-fries whitebait in that episode. I used to love whitebait, and then on a Christmas works' night out three years ago, I was fed some suspect whitebait and could taste it for days afterwards. (Is it just me or is the food on work nights out inevitably revolting?)

The clocks went forward last night, spelling the beginning of British summertime. The sky was relentlessly blue today and from indoors it seemed as though summer had indeed begun; outside, though, a chilly wind still dominated. Nonetheless, changing the clocks seems to have a psychological impact, marking the time to wake up rather than hibernate, to look forward to warmer days, and to plan the summer. That is, if you aren't still knocked for six by having to get up an hour earlier.

Chilli con carne - from Happy Days

2007-03-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

For a while, Happy Days with the Naked Chef was my favourite of Jamie's early books; as soon as I got it (my brother actually bought it for me, when it came out, from the book people), I bonded with it. The baked onions with cheese and cream are divine, as are the roasted winter vegetables and the parsnip and pancetta tagliatelle. This is the book where Jamie introduces his chicken-in-a-bag (roasted in the oven) and unveils more dried pasta dishes than in the previous books. The chilli, though, is an ultimate chilli recipe, for me, anyway. For a while we ate it almost every week; it is a useful dish to make ahead and serves as a tasty, easy, weeknight dinner if you do cook it in advance. It's also versatile - you can team it with rice or with bread and salad, as Jamie suggests, or with flour tortillas, guacamole and sour cream. Oh, and it has tinned kidney beans in it, so you don't have to remember to soak the beans. Bonus. This chilli is one of my failsafe recipes of all time; I don't need the recipe now, I make it on autopilot. The other day we both craved it so I made it again - for the first time in months and months. It won't be months before I make it again.

Everyone knows how to make chilli. This one isn't authentic, one presumes, but I've never been all that bothered about authentic, particularly for a dish of uncertain origins like this one. Jamie's version involves:
- blitzing onion and garlic in a food processor and gently frying until soft
- adding minced beef, powdered cumin and chilli powder, a chopped fresh red chilli (deseeded), 2 tins chopped tomatoes, a wineglass of water, a cinnamon stick, and 200g sundried tomatoes in oil, blitzed with some of their oil to make a paste, and simmering with greaseproof paper and a lid on the pan for 1 hour,
then adding 2 drained tins kidney beans and simmering for a further 30 minutes.

I like the addition of the sundried tomatoes - when I've been too lazy to use my Magimix, I've chopped the onion and garlic and then used sundried tomato paste, but it honestly isn't the same, not really. This chilli isn't super-hot; it isn't exceptionally different; it's just really nice. Proof of which lies in my having cooked it over and over again for the last five years.

Chilli, wrapped in tortillas, guacamole (Simon's speciality) on top and sour cream alongside.

This was our second Mexican meal recently. The first was chicken fajitas, with peppers and onions and garlic, guacamole, sour cream, grated Cheddar. OK so again inauthentic, but again I plead guilty (I do eat proper Mexican food, too).

In other news, in case anyone is interested, term ends tomorrow. Happy days indeed. Sadly contrary to popular belief, this does not mean I'm officially on holiday as of tomorrow evening, but it does mean that the pace can drop and the students go away. I might even be able to plan some Easter baking!

The Return of the Naked Chef - salmon in prosciutto

2007-03-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

I'm cheating. I figure since I made up the rules for my blog, then I'm perfectly entitled to cheat. My progress with Jamie has been shameful of late, a consequence of too much work and not enough time to seek out the ingredients I need to get on with my project. A tip to anyone considering cooking their way through a book - it is easier if you don't have a job. If you do have a job, you will end up either a) eating at midnight and slowly going mad or b) not living up to your own intentions. I have to accept that I simply don't have time at present to seek out John Dory or living lobster; I will hopefully find more time soon, but for now it is slow progress. From within my standstill, though, I've remembered Jamie's earlier books, all of which (apart from Jamie's Kitchen which I've cooked very little from and don't even know why because I love to read it; I suspect it is because the book is unwieldy and I can't easily read it while I dry my hair in the morning) have supplied me with long-term culinary favourites.

The Return of the Naked Chef gave me blackened aubergine, salad dressings, farfalle with Savoy cabbage, pancetta, thyme and mozzarella, tray-baked cod with runner beans, pancetta and pine nuts, fish pie, roasted poussin wrapped with streaky bacon and stuffed with potatoes and sage, fantastic roasted chicken, Pete's superlative lamb curry, some wicked marinades and rubs for meat, the Botham burger, baked carrots with cumin, thyme, butter and Chardonnay, not to mention Maltesers and ice cream. Some of these have become favourites; in the summer I obsessively return to the hot and fragrant or the Cajun spicy rub for chops. I hadn't tried the salmon fillet wrapped in prosciutto with herby lentils, spinach and yoghurt though. I don't know why. Then the other day I was reading this book whilst drying my hair and the recipe caught my eye and attracted my appetite. I had salmon in the freezer and the other ingredients to hand, apart from prosciutto which I cheekily replaced with pancetta.

To make it, basically, cook lentils (I used Puy lentils) until tender. Season salmon fillets with salt and pepper and wrap in the prosciutto slices, leaving some flesh exposed; drizzle with olive oil and roast for around 10 minutes. Drain the water from the lentils, season with salt, pepper, lemon juice and a few glugs of olive oil. Just before serving, stir chopped mixed herbs and spinach into the lentils on a high heat until wilted. Serve on plates with the salmon and drizzled with seasoned natural yoghurt.

The salmon was good (as fish wrapped in bacon tends to be). The lentils were really good - I loved the seasoned yoghurt, giving the dish some zing (lentils can be a bit earthy and dull). It was an easy but tasty dinner. One to add to my favourites list!

Prawn cocktail

2007-03-04T10:08:00.000-08:00

Prawn cocktail, for me, is inextricably associated with my childhood, when it was the fall-back starter at every dinner table. I remember a friend inviting another friend and me back for tea on her 12th birthday; we had prawn cocktail and then tandoori chicken and we thought that we were the epitome of cool. Or rather she did - I predictably didn't really like prawns and was frantically thinking up ways to avoid the starter, whilst maintaining an air of sophistication. I don't remember how or if I contrived not to eat it. That episode apart, prawn cocktail was utterly ubiquitous as I was growing up, and then it did a vanishing act and I forgot about it completely until a few years ago, when I tried Delia's version for the 21st century and was bowled over- that version, like Jamie's, has avocado in it, and I can't resist avocado in any form. I am also alarmingly keen on the vile-sounding Marie Rose sauce, which by rights should terrify anyone. So if anyone is planning a retro dinner party, I'd be happy to come along.

Anyway, to make this particular prawn cocktail, I washed and drained a round and a little gem lettuce and dressed them with lemon juice, seasoning and a little olive oil. I made the Marie Rose sauce with mayonnaise, tomato ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and - this was a new one for me - a little brandy. I know brandy sounds really odd. I knew that as I added it, hoping it would turn out okay and wouldn't ruin that implausibly tasty sauce. To serve, I laid wedges of avocado on a plate, added the prawns and the lettuce leaves and spooned over the sauce, drizzling it around the plate, then smattering the dish with cayenne. On the side, as suggested, we had pangrattato made from stale white bread. I should add that prawn cocktail is often served in a glass; Jamie's, in the picture, is on a plate. I asked Simon what he thought about serving it in a glass and he insisted that that would be naff, so we stuck to the simple white plate. The kitsch exhibitionist in me quite liked the idea of the glass, but in the end the plate looked pretty good too...

What to say? It was really good; the brandy didn't ruin the sauce at all (although I am not convinced that the brandy is absolutely essential). It reminded me why retro isn't necessarily a bad thing and that the revival of the prawn cocktail is definitely a good thing (as long as it isn't the only starter doing the dinner party rounds). Who knows - maybe I'll kickstart the retro food revolution round here.

Grilled and roasted red mullet with pancetta and thyme

2007-02-28T12:04:00.000-08:00

Finally, finally back to Jamie. It is one of those weeks, jammed full of tedious meetings and flurries of paperwork, that I read and promptly forget the content of. There are weeks like that. Luckily there's nothing on television so I don't feel I'm missing out too much when the papers come home with me. Anyway yesterday Simon managed to use his lunch break to go to the fishmonger so we were lucky enough to be able to get red mullet. I don't know if I'd had red mullet before - I don't remember, but then I've had all sorts of fish in France that I didn't know the names for at the time, so I might have had. In any case I certainly never cooked it before so it felt more exciting than the usual suspects (salmon being most frequently called upon, mainly out of convenience). The only thing was that I was rushing around a lot yesterday and so hardly had time to brief Simon on what fish to buy. He returned from the fishmonger and announced he had found 2 red mullet, scaled, cleaned and gutted, but headless. I was disappointed because I liked the aesthetics of the head-on red mullet gleaming out of Jamie's photo; when it comes to food photos, I can be a bit superficial. I got over it quickly enough when we got home and unwrapped the fish - they looked pearly pink and beautiful, even without their heads. And losing the heads does make eating them feel a bit less visceral, somehow.

This is another simple recipe, which is good for those nights when you hurry home from work late under yet another raincloud and can't be bothered with fancy cooking. Basically, rub each fish with olive oil and season them, inside and out; stuff with lemon slices and sprigs of thyme or marjoram. Griddle on each side for 1 minute, remove to a chopping board, wrap each fish in two slices of pancetta and top with an anchovy fillet, then roast, topped with extra herbs, until cooked.

I had no idea how this was going to taste. I was hoping that the herbs, combined with lemon, pancetta and anchovy would make the dullest fish taste good. I was right, except that red mullet isn't dull at all - it had an amazing flavour. I really enjoyed this; it was incredibly tasty and, although headless, still exquisitely pink and pretty. I ate it almost drooling, and the bones for once didn't bother me, because the fish was so good. I can't believe I waited 31 years to try red mullet and I will definitely try it again, soon. Yum.

I've missed Jamie's recipes over the last week. The problem is simply finding an opportunity to locate ingredients and/or to find time to, for example, make pasta for dinner. If we get home by 6, it's fine. Any later and we're eating the wallpaper. Well, not literally, because we don't have wallpaper, but I have never been one to allow literality to cramp my style. The problem is I'm already craving red mullet again, but next I need to track down some John Dory, or a whole salmon small enough to feed two. Not to mention attend another series of meetings and read some more ozone-layer killing stacks of papers.

Other blog!

2007-02-21T12:44:00.000-08:00

I'm on my other blog for a few days, until I can locate ingredients for the next Jamie recipe... I even did my first meme over there!!!

Kathryn

Minted peas in olive oil

2007-02-20T12:29:00.000-08:00

It took me years to cotton on to the fact that the pea had become a socially acceptable, nay, desirable, vegetable. Through my childhood, peas and baked beans were inevitably offered as the fall-back vegetable in any children's meal, with the result that when I went to university I thought peas were totally naff. I forgot about them for a few years whilst experimenting with more unusual ingredients; they were simply off my radar, unless someone served me them, which to be honest didn't happen because in the nineties everyone was serving mangetout and sugar snaps, or butternut squash if they were a bit adventurous. At some point I realized that peas had resurfaced in the collective culinary consciousness but I couldn't subscribe to it; I carried on with my fresh greens, ignoring the frozen pea as the vegetable equivalent of a frozen ready meal. I can't remember when epiphany happened - perhaps I bought peas to serve with shepherd's pie, or perhaps in order to make a pea puree - but ever since that forgotten moment, I've kept a bag of frozen petits pois in my freezer, and when wondering what to make as a side dish, particularly for chicken or fish, I often opt for blitzed peas with mint or basil. Try it; it's easy but addictive and a bit chic (although I write as one with little idea, culinarily speaking, of what chic might look like).

I hadn't made this recipe, for minted peas in olive oil, despite the not-to-be-sneezed-at convenience factor of frozen peas, because the blurb calls it a summer dish and that put me off temporarily. In my defence, frozen peas make it an environmentally sound way of eating summer food in the winter; no courgettes or asparagus have been flown across the world to indulge me this time. The dish is rewardingly simple: place peas in a saucepan and cover with a bunch of fresh mint. Pour in boiling water and return to the boil; simmer for a couple of minutes. Drain, transfer to a dish, season and add either lemon juice or wine vinegar (I went for lemon juice) and then cover with good extra virgin olive oil. Leave for at least half an hour for the flavours to infuse and serve.

These peas were nice - they had a good flavour - but they didn't blow me away. I think they might, in the summer; they just don't feel quite right for February. I served them with parmesan chicken; I think they deserved a more delicate plate-fellow. I think I'll have to try them again later in the year.

Oh, and I know it's Shrove Tuesday, aka Pancake Day. I am not really a pancake person so this may be the only foodie festival I don't eagerly await. Nor - confession-time now - do I ever give anything up for Lent. That said, I look forward to reading about other people's pancakes. My friend's little boy loves pancakes more than anything else, and was once allowed a pancake when he was feeling sick and didn't feel like the food everyone else was having. Since then, he sometimes asks for pancakes and, when his request is denied, he rubs his stomach and says 'but I feel sick, so I need a pancake'. Shrove Tuesday must be food heaven for him, but for me, roll on Easter lamb and - most importantly of all - the end of term!

Overnight slow-roasted pork

2007-02-19T10:52:00.000-08:00

I've been eyeing up the recipe for slow-roasted pork for months. I am very partial to slow-cooked meat in general, although I'd never tried roasting pork for as long as this recipe requires. Undoubtedly I'd have tried it earlier, but for the instruction to cook a 5-6 kg piece of pork shoulder on the bone, followed by the reminder to check that your roasting tin - and your oven - are big enough. I don't suppose either my trays or my oven would have been; in any case, we'd have been eating pork for months, which might have prejudiced my feelings about it. Usually I am undeterred by scaling recipes down, but another sentence put me off: 'this recipe only works with a whole shoulder'. I couldn't see why but I am an obedient cook and I thought that this (along with those elusive live lobsters) might prevent me from cooking right through this book. Which would be a shame because I genuinely love slow-cooked meat. Anyway I consulted an anonymous Scottish oracle who advised me on how to adapt the recipe to the meat I could find. I bought a 3kg piece of pork shoulder and cut the cooking time slightly; the smell emanating from the oven all day was seriously tempting, a clarion call from the kitchen as I indulged in a Sunday afternoon novel. I could hardly wait for it to be ready.

To prepare the pork, lay roughly chopped carrot, obion, celery and fennel (fennel again...) in a roasting tray with bashed garlic cloves and some thyme sprigs. Bash up fennel seeds with salt and massage all over the scored skin of the pork, pushing the mix into the scores to boost the flavour of the meat. Put in an oven preheated to maximum for 20-30 minutes until it has begun to colour, then turn the oven down to 120C and cook for 9-12 hours. Then tip a bottle of white wine into the tray and cook for another hour. Mash the vegetables in the tray. Add chicken or vegetable stock to the tray and boil until you have an intense gravy. Serve with borlotti beans, braised greens, roast veg mash and tasty sauce.

My method differed marginally. I did everything as suggested, kept the oven at 120 even though mine is a seemingly turbo-charged fan oven, wherein 120 is not really 120. I cooked it for 6 1/2-7 hours at that temperature before adding the wine.

I also didn't mash up the veg; I threw it out. I know that sounds wasteful, but it had absorbed so much fat from the pork that it didn't look appetizing. I served the pork with borlotti beans, steamed purple sprouting broccoli and the light gravy.

Before Gravy:

After Gravy:

It was utterly delicious; Simon called it a 110% dinner. The pork was as promised meltingly tender and it had absorbed masses of flavour from the fennel. The sauce was equally lovely. I would make it again, like a shot - it was so easy and yet fantastic.

It occurs to me that I would never think of making this sort of food when people come over. When people invite you over, they tend to serve prime cuts, presumably so you don't write them off as cheapskates. That is all wrong - this sort of food cooks itself while you rest; nobody ends up flustered and red-faced thanks to the last-minute cooking that prime cuts inevitably demand. This is ideal food for entertaining, or for a lazy Sunday when you feel like reading and drinking tea while the meat looks after itself in the oven. Given the oven is on so low, you could even pop out to the pub...

Fabulous fish stew

2007-02-18T08:27:00.000-08:00

I should confess here that once upon a time fish stew was the stuff of my nightmares- literally. I remember fish soups from childhood holidays in France; I found them utterly repugnant and would never have dreamed of even touching the seafood with my finger, let alone putting it into my mouth. I was, as I've said before, the quintessentially Picky English Child, who arrives in France and wonders why meat has blood oozing out of it and why fish doesn't always come battered. Campsites were social places and my parents always seemed to befriend French people with fish fetishes (or so it appeared to me); I remember one party where my brother and I were forced to go and there was very little we would eat. I repeated, over and over, polite but unyielding, 'non merci', to caviar, to what looked like raw bacon (I'd never had that kind of ham in Britain), to smelly cheese, indeed, to everything but the hunks of white baguette. Luckily my grandmother sneaked us back to our caravan for a Nutella sandwich and some Opal Fruits, smuggled in from England to appease us when necessary. Going out for dinner was okay, because there were creperies, where I inevitably ordered a ham and cheese crepe (I once braved a chocolate crepe, but the chocolate was too dark for me and I left it; I saw that as the result of changing a routine and learnt my lesson). There were also restaurants with lobsters and crabs on display, waiting to be killed and served up, that Grandma ordered, but these places also had non-fishy offerings and so I wasn't forced to starve.

Fastforward a few years. In September 1995 I arrived in the south of France to begin a year as an English assistant in two French schools. I had no idea what to expect: Cambridge didn't prepare me one bit for independent living in another country, other than ensuring that I was au fait with that country's literature and philosophy. I suppose that's a start, but it doesn't help when you're confronted with bewildering bureaucracy on the one hand, and an infuriating laid-back refusal to take anything seriously on the other. For the first month, I didn't even know what my timetable was because the two schools were at war with each other, using me as the pawn in their struggle. I felt tired all the time, worn out by listening to the southern French accent for hours on end, by the unfamiliar heat in late September, by waiting in queues at various bureaucratic places only to be told that the office was closed for a four hour lunch break. In the middle of all this, I was invited out for dinner a lot, which was welcome, but terrifying; nobody ever asked me what I did and didn't eat. I can't remember if this was a mid-90s thing (before we all got allergy obsessed) or if it was a French thing. Certainly in Cambridge we hadn't needed to consider food in that light: we either ate in the canteen, which ran a rota of stodgy but safe dinners (macaroni cheese, chicken casserole, deep fried fish) or we cooked, which in practice meant that we made pasta, stirfries or warmed up pizzas. Nobody cooked particularly adventurous food so we never really needed to ask what people ate or did not eat. In France, though, the first time I went out it was to the local tennis club, where my landlady's boyfriend was a member; we ate outside, very late in the evening, and the meal was bouillabaisse with aioli and crusty bread. I remember seeing the huge bowl in front of me; I remember thinking I would be sick if I had to eat it, but I had no idea how to refuse. In the end I ate it slowly, tempering it with bread, chewing methodically and deliberately not tasting it. I wasn't sick. I hoped it might be a one-off but it wasn't: people were always inviting me for a casual supper and every time that supper turned out to be bouillabaisse. After a while, I came to like it, which was a relief. (The same happened with olives. To my eternal regret I never managed to get to like raw tomatoes)

Despite my slow conversion to it, I have never cooked fish stew, partly because Simon only recently discovered that he liked seafood other than prawns and partly (this is going to sound feeble, but I'll say it anyway) because it's messy food and I like food to be neat; I like smooth soups more than chunky ones, for instance. It's all about perception and nothing about taste. I do eat messy food, but I tend not to cook it. Anyway, yesterday I went to the fishmongers and got the wherewithall for Jamie's fish stew. I bought a teeny bit of monkfish, a filleted sea bass, mussels, no clams because there weren't any, red mullet, and langoustines. I should say that I won't be going back to that fishmonger (it wasn't the one I've been going to, in town; it was another, further away) because she was utterly graceless and her filleting was decidedly odd.

Onto the recipe. The stew is served with saffron aioli (mayonnaise smashed with garlic, saffron and little salt and lemon) and crusty bread. To make the stew part, I simmered white wine, garlic, basil stalks and a tin of tomatoes for 10-15 minutes or so, then added all the fish and seafood in one layer (to do this, you need a very big pan. The biggest one I had was just big enough), put the lid on, and simmered for 10 minutes or so.

When the stew was ready, I toasted two slices of bread and put each in the base of a serving bowl. I poured over the stew and topped with fennel tops, basil leaves, a little olive oil and a big spoonful of saffron aioli.

We both enjoyed the stew a lot. I liked how the sauce soaked into the bread, and I loved the saffron aioli - it went really well with the tomatoey broth. Mmm. It is messy food, both to look at and to eat, but it tastes great. Shame that most people I know wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. I wonder if they should have the French treatment - come round and be told it's fish stew or just bread for dinner, tough if you don't like it/have an allergy/prefer meat. Once I invited someone for dinner and she asked what I was cooking; it was a mid-week dinner and I replied 'chicken curry'. She twisted her face like a contortionist and said 'I prefer lamb - could you do lamb for me instead?' This woman is so picky that she has a social as well as a food problem (she basically only likes lamb curry, beef pizza, and biscuits); I won't get started on her eating habits or we won't be eating tonight, but I dream of revenge in the form of a scary fish stew, complete with saffron mayo and protruding seafood limbs.

Valentines Day!

2007-02-15T11:20:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was Valentine's Day... I couldn't see a suitably romantic recipe in Jamie this time so tune into my other blog to see my opinions on Valentines Day and what we ate!

Shell-roasted scallops

2007-02-14T12:21:00.000-08:00

I vaguely recall Gordon Ramsay rebuking a hapless restaurant owner/chef for serving food in scallop shells; I can't remember the exact expletives but his scorn has stayed with me. Sorry Gordon, but I'm not a restaurant owner and I cooked scallops in their shells. Is that such a crime against food? Or public taste? I don't think so. I didn't set out to cook scallops yesterday. I went to court in the morning, accompanying a colleague who had got on the wrong side of the DVLA (note to anyone out there contemplating battle with the DVLA: don't) and, thanks to a series of errors, beginning with her garage failing to send the DVLA the appropriate documentation on time and complicated by the DVLA sending her mail to an old address, she was summoned to court by the Secretary of State for Transport. The whole thing felt Kafkaesque; the magistrate perched behind a high bar while we sat down below on those ubiquitous blue chairs that seem de rigeur in all functionary buildings now, including university buildings, if you are lucky enough to be in one that has been renovated (there are also ageing red ones with stuffing oozing out). Anyway the magistrate looked like a caricature of a television magistrate, straining in his old-fashioned suit and peering out of little round glasses. I kept wanting to laugh, except that it was serious. Luckily the magistrate had the sense to annul the judgement with reasonable speed. I came back into town on the metro; some students got on near town and began to debate the intensity of their hangovers. I got off the metro, wandered past the fishmonger and found scallops in their shells, so I bought them and decided to try out Jamie's recipes. I should say that they were pretty expensive; scallops aren't something you should buy on the spur of the moment as you pass the fishmonger, particularly large, juicy king scallops. Or maybe they are...

Jamie has three recipes for scallops in their shells and suggests making them as a starter - presumably choosing one of the three recipes. I decided to try all three; since I had six scallops, I made two of each so we both got to try each one.

Scallops the old-school French way:

Sit the scallops in their shells over chopped spinach and top with a mix of butter, lemon zest, parsley, garlic and nutmeg; drizzle with extra virgin olive oil. Bake on top of a layer of rice or salt for 12 minutes.

Scallops with sweet tomato and basil

Blitz fresh tomatoes, garlic, basil, balsamic vinegar and seasoning with a knob of butter; spoon into the scallop shells and put the scallop on top, covering with a rasher of pancetta. Bake on top of a layer of rice or salt for 15 minutes.

Scallops with ginger, soy and coriander

Lay scallops in their shells and pour over a mix of soy, lime, ginger, sugar, sesame oil and coriander, drizzle with olive oil and bake on top of a layer of rice or salt for 12 minutes.

The French-style scallop was nice; the Asian-style scallop tastier still and the Italian-style scallop (with tomatoes and basil and pancetta) was absolutely delicious. The bacon had infused the scallop and worked really well with the tomato and basil sauce. It would be a fantastic starter, always presuming your guests are the sort of people you can feed scallops to, which isn't a given around here, because you can layer up the scallop in advance and refrigerate until you're ready to bake it. I suppose you might not want to serve scallops in their shells to Gordon Ramsay, but I thought they looked and tasted lovely; as Jamie says, they might look like '1980s retro campness on a plate', but who said there was anything wrong with 1980s retro campness? I defy anyone not to succumb to a scallop, baked in its shell.

Greek salad; baked and dressed courgettes

2007-02-13T12:27:00.000-08:00

Greek salad inevitably reminds me of a restaurant we used to go to as students, a ridiculously cheap Greek place with an alarmingly long menu, which we liked just because it was cheap, really, and set up like a real restaurant, unlike the other cheap places. We often went for people's birthdays and before I went on my year abroad, my friends (who mainly weren't going abroad) took me to dinner there and there was a big cake with good luck inscribed on it in colourful icing. Anyway, whatever you ordered, they always plonked a huge Greek salad on the table as well and I always used to steal the torn pieces of oregano-infused feta cheese from the top. I should admit now that I don't eat raw tomatoes, which apparently makes me something of a pariah; it wasn't a great position to defend when I lived in the south of France, where they seemed to be almost compulsory. This is the last salad in the book apart from the green salad, that I promise I have made but didnt take a picture of because, well, it looked like green salad and as someone who doesn't eat tomatoes, I have eaten an awful lot of green salads. I put off the Greek salad purely on account of tomatoes; I have trouble seeing tomatoes in salads as a good thing. I finally decided to make it, though, to go with lamb chops and baked courgettes and pretend summer was coming, which is obviously unlikely in rainy February.

The salad is easy - mix plum tomatoes, roughly cut up, with wedges of avocado, black olives, chopped shallot, oregano, splashes of red wine vinegar and olive oil, salt and pepper. Add cos lettuce leaves (the larger leaves torn) and dress with lemon oil (ratio 1: 3 lemon juice: oil) and transfer to a bowl; crumble feta cheese over and drizzle with olive oil and more oregano.

With the salad, I made lamb chops and simple baked and dressed courgettes, also from Jamie. You should use small courgettes. wash and dry them, then toss in olive oil, salt and pepper and then bake for 15 minutes. Dress with red wine vinegar, chopped parsley and mint; balance with extra virgin olive oil and more seasoning if needed.

The salad was good; I approve of the addition of avocado, but then I'm a fully paid-up avocado fan. The courgettes looked simple but tasted surprisingly nice and, given how easy they are, they are definitely to be repeated. The lamb worked well with the courgettes and salad.

It doesn't look beautiful but nice dinners frequently don't, well, not unless some food stylist comes along and changes everything. Speaking of food stylists, am I the only one to be irritated when in a cookbook a photo bears no resemblance to the recipe cited, and you can very well see that the recipe has been altered slightly (presumably to improve the photo)? That was a rhetorical question as I know it has exercised the mind of Julian Barnes, the wonderful Pedant in the Kitchen. Jamie is less guilty than some (Donna Hay springs to mind, and I do like her recipes, but... ) because his books take care to appear less orchestrated (but we all know that the natural look takes time to achieve). Simon is our resident photographer; when I get hold of the camera our dinners all look muddy.

Anyway since the salad section is complete, time to take stock. One recipe stood out: the Fifteen Christmas salad. I loved that and it is really versatile. I also loved the homemade coleslaw- what a revelation. Other highlights for me: potato and horseradish salad with fine herbs and bresaola and warm salad of crispy smoked bacon and Jerusalem artichokes, as well as the all-day breakfast salad and the warm grilled peach salad. I think that might be too many favourites, but I am only a blogger and not a professional constrained by hierarchies. I am now a convert to warm salads. I can't believe another section is finished. At one point I felt as though the book would go on forever; now I can see the end and I don't want to, because there has been something exciting about the whole project (I can't explain why) that makes me not want it to end. I guess Jamie needs to write another book soon...

Ultimate gingerbread

2007-02-12T10:34:00.000-08:00

Why do weekends go so fast? I know it's a cliche but it is true. This weekend we did nice things: on Saturday we had lunch with my parents and then saw my grandmother, who had baked a lovely walnut cake and made us tea. Yesterday we went shopping and I indulged in the Clarins event at John Lewis (my excuse is that I have poor skin and cheap products often give me a rash. Make of that what you will) and bought some espresso cups that I had been craving. I also baked gingerbread (see below) and we had roast beef for Sunday dinner (which we have in the evening...) which was as delicious as it always is (Don't worry. I didn't take a picture of it. I am sure you all know what a rib of beef looks like) and suddenly I woke up and it was Monday. It seems to have been raining for days here; we haven't had the snow that has plagued other parts of Britain, but we have had interminable rain.

Anyway, onto food. After I wrote the last post mentioning gingerbread, the thought of gingerbread insinuated its way naughtily into my head (isn't it always the way...?) and so I felt obliged to make Jamie's ultimate gingerbread recipe yesterday. It is derived from the fabulous recipe from a shop in Grasmere, a recipe that is around 150 years old and has attracted much publicity - I think this is it here; the owner keeps the recipe a secret, and this is Jamie's attempt to recreate the secret recipe. I have never tasted the original and thus can't comment on the comparison, but I am now feeling the need to make a trip to Grasmere.

This gingerbread has a shortbread base, which, Jamie suggests, you can make yourself from his shortbread recipe or buy. His shortbread recipe is utterly heavenly and I have vowed not to go back to the bought stuff, so I made the shortbread first, but of course Simon saw it come out of the oven and was excited at being given that shortbread again - it is, honestly, delectable. I could see the disappointment in his face when I admitted that the shortbread was simply one ingredient in the gingerbread. I admit I shared his misgivings - the shortbread is just too good to waste if the gingerbread doesn't turn out really well - but I knew that I had to get past that stage and get on with making the gingerbread. A little voice was playing in my head, though, as I turned the shortbread into gingerbread, saying, repeatedly, 'this won't be as good as the shortbread on its own'.

To make the gingerbread, blitz the shortbread with some powdered ginger and caster sugar, setting aside 100g of the mix. Add mixed peel, crystallized ginger, plain flour and baking powder; pulse until well mixed.

Melt a mixture of butter, treacle and golden syrup in a large pan, then add the mix from the food processor and stir until combined. Spoon the mix into a baking tray and smooth it level across the baking tray with a spatula or your fingers; once flat, bake in an oven preheated to 170C for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and scatter over the reserved shortbread mixture, pressing it down with your fingers or a spatula. Cut into pieces with a sharp knife and then leave to cool before turning out.

The smell of ginger was almost irresistible as the gingerbread cooked and cooled. I was worried about removing it from the tray as initially it seemed a bit bendy, but once it had cooled it was easy to lift out and serve. And I am happy to report that I definitely hadn't wasted the shortbread - this gingerbread is incredibly gingery and has masses of flavour; it is really the ultimate gingerbread, not just one of Jamie's over-statements. It was even better today, which I find is an important criterion in judging recipes because when I bake on Sundays I really want a piece of baked goodness to cheer me up on a wet Monday faced with hungover students and moaning colleagues. As I ate a piece after lunch today, I remembered that Jamie suggests that as well as eating it as a biscuit, you could use it as a cheesecake base... which is now somewhat inevitably making me dream of gingerbread cheesecake. A good way to spend a Monday evening!

New blog!

2007-02-10T13:14:00.000-08:00

I've cooked over 100 recipes from Cook with Jamie now. I still have a good few to go but it has reached a stage where the remaining recipes can't practically be cooked as quickly as I have been doing, unless I give up any pretension to sensible eating and live on a diet of seafood and desserts (they being the bulk of the outstanding recipes). I have inevitably begun to imagine Life After Jamie, which I hadn't done before, although I still haven't started counting (it seems horribly soulless). Anyway I will of course continue to blog my way through the remaining recipes but I've also started a new blog project, which I'll develop while I work on through Jamie and continue more frequently after Jamie. My new blog is called From Page to Plate and is intended as a space in which to enjoy and explore my twin loves of food and books (and cookbooks, that neatly combine the two). I will be reviewing my over-extensive cookbook collection, testing out recipes, trying out new foods, and also writing about the novels that sustain me as much as food. Check out the beginning of my blog on http://www.frompagetoplate.blogspot.com.

I won't forget about Jamie, though, and this blog will continue apace - plenty of exciting recipes to come (I haven't even got to the meringue section yet.... that could be very exciting, since I've never made a meringue in my life). In a sense this blog is the most extensive cookbook review I've ever done and will ever do, and I feel I've still got some distance to go before I can offer up a considered opinion. I certainly need to try the Ultimate Gingerbread first!

Grilled or roasted monkfish with black olive sauce and lemon mash

2007-02-08T13:02:00.000-08:00

I honestly don't recall ever eating monkfish when I was younger. I don't remember anyone eating monkfish. It entered my consciousness about the same time as rocket, which I now eat almost every day, and as sundried tomatoes. Probably I was a bit slow to catch on because I was a student living in the culinary backwater of Cambridge and living on stir-fries and nights out in the local pub; I was hardly at the front of cutting edge food trends. That said, I am convinced that I ate monkfish in France, reasonably often, before I tasted it here. My favourite monkfish recipe comes from Happy Days, Jamie's third book, that my brother bought for me in 2001; at that point I already owned the first two books, The Naked Chef in paperback and its sequel in hardback. I found Happy Days immediately appealing and accessible, more so than the first two books, although time has nuanced that impression and I have come to love the Naked Chef in particular. Anyway from Happy Days I tried the baked onion recipe - which is to die for, almost literally, given the cream and bacon - the parsnip and pancetta tagliatelle, the chicken in a bag, the roast vegetables, and the roasted monkfish smeared with blitzed sundried tomatoes, basil, garlic and oil and wrapped in prosciutto. I now make a cheapo version using other white fish fillets, because monkfish is trendily expensive in this country. Anyway I had been looking forward to this new monkfish recipe as an excuse to splurge on monkfish, instead of making do with cheaper fish fillets, and as a chance to try lemon mash, which sounded intriguing.

Jamie points out that monkfish can leach out juices when cooking and thus the recipe involves bashing up salt, rosemary and lemon zest in a pestle and mortar and rubbing it into the fish before leaving the fish to marinate for an hour. After an hour, rub it dry and either grill it or fry it for 2 mins in an oven-proof frying pan and then turn over and move the pan to a hot oven for 6-8 minutes, until cooked. Meanwhile, make the salsa, which consists of chopped basil, parsley and marjoram, celery heart leaves, garlic, lemon juice, black olives and red chilli, and also boil floury potatoes for the lemon mash. When cooked, mash the potatoes with olive oil, milk, lemon juice and seasoning. Serve with rocket dressed in lemon juice and olive oil.

This is a very nice recipe. The lemon mash was quite a revelation, but I suggest anyone who finds lemon overpowering beware; I love lemon, and I loved the lemony mash, but I am probably more citrus-obsessed than most. I will definitely make that again. The monkfish was deliciously meaty and the salsa very tangy - I will probably repeat the salsa with different fish too, as it has masses of flavour. This was a lovely dinner, ideal for a Thursday night treat when you're exhausted and the working week is grinding slowly to its conclusion and the weekend is finally approaching, though it would be a lovely dinner party meal too... Well, it would if your guests like olives and fish, which in my world is actually not to be taken for granted. Don't get me started on picky people, although I am coming to realize that I am closer to the picky child I once was and now mainly despise than I tend to believe. I'm not really in the mood for dinner parties at the moment: teaching is a pretty sociable activity, and at the moment I talk almost all day long, so I don't really feel like opening my mouth much in the evening. I just want to cook, eat something delicious and slump into a novel or the television and shut out the world. Monkfish with black olive salsa and lemony mash is a pretty classy way of doing that and comes highly recommended if anyone feels like giving it a go.

Gnocchi with gorgonzola dolce

2007-02-06T12:22:00.000-08:00

This recipe has to be the ultimate in lazy comfort food; it must have almost no nutritional value. My excuse is that I have to tick it off in the book, that I've had a tiring few days (students crying, paperwork avalanches, and so on) and that everyone deserves to forget about their vegetable quotient occasionally. Before I get to the gnocchi, though, I promised to present my brother's little dog, Shea. Stuart kindly obliged in sending pet photos (anyone would think he was proud of them). Anyway here is Shea, with her best friend, Bonnie (who belongs to my brother's mother-in-law); Shea is the little cocker spaniel, Bonnie the golden retriever.

Here are the two dogs and the cat, Chloe, eating together (feeding time at the zoo...)

It is quite easy to imagine what happens after the cosy threesome eat their dinner: the cat doesn't finish hers and the dogs keep trying to gobble hers up on top of their own. Anyway - hopefully my food tastes better than theirs, although I can't say I don't sometimes feel like diving right in and troughing it up in one go as the dogs do....

To make the gnocchi with gorgonzola dolce, you might want to source gorgonzola dolce; I couldn't, and made do with ordinary gorgonzola. Anyway make the potato gnocchi as usual and boil. Meanwhile, heat up gorgonzola cheese with butter and double cream, season, and stir into a smooth cheese sauce. Toss the gnocchi in the sauce and add marjoram; serve with grated Parmesan. It couldn't be easier, really. Except that I am still in the novice category in terms of gnocchi making, and, mindful of the imperative not to add too much flour, I was possibly over judicious with my pasta flour. The gnocchi didn't fall apart, but they were more fuzzy-edged than my previous effort.

This didn't seem to matter; at least, it didn't matter to me. The sauce was divine - anything so sinful is likely to be, I suppose. It slipped down very quickly, very comfortingly, probably far too easily.

Warm salad of crispy smoked bacon and Jerusalem artichokes

2007-02-05T10:50:00.000-08:00

This weekend we went to London, so that I could attend a day-long work meeting and Simon could meet some friends. The good part was we got to stay with my brother, Stuart, and his wife, Lisa, and their menagerie - by which I mean a dog and a cat. Their personalities are dramatically different (the dog as opposed to the cat, not Stu and Lisa): the cat is like a very cool teenage girl, who expects to be waited on and betrays little sign of neediness, whilst the dog - a cocker spaniel - is like an eager toddler, thirsting for human attention. I'm not an animal person (and that is an understatement) but I have a particular soft spot for that little dog. She sits and gazes imploring at you while you eat, beseeching you to hand some food over to her; she likes to have her tummy tickled. I've asked Stu to send me a photo of the animals so that they can make a guest blog appearance; I don't know if he will oblige. Anyway, animals aside, it was a good trip; the trains were a bit late both ways, and pretty late on the return leg of the journey, but it was nice to see my brother and sister-in-law and I managed to read two novels on the train (one each way): School's Out by Christophe Dufosse and The Girls by Lori Lansens, both of which are compelling in completely different ways. The former is a sort of French answer to Donna Tartt's The Secret History; it is menacing and intelligent and suspenseful, with the usual dose of French weirdness. The latter I expected to hate, but didn't, because the girls of the title - craniopagus twins, which means joined at the head - are portrayed very convincingly.

I realize I am off-topic, but then that isn't anything new. Yesterday I was too tired to embark on the usual Sunday marathon bake session but I did want to try something new for lunch - hence the warm salad with crispy bacon and Jerusalem artichokes (I am a fan of Jerusalem artichokes. I know many people are not). I like warm salads - they manage to make you feel you're eating healthily (the green parts) but they aren't rabbit food either; they are substantial enough to keep you going. This salad involved scrubbing the artichokes and boiling them until tender; then cooling, halving and setting them aside. Meanwhile I washed and sliced radicchio and little gem lettuce and placed in a bowl with chopped flat-leaf parsley. I sliced the bacon and fried it in a little olive oil, adding the arichokes and sliced red onion when the bacon was golden, and continuing until the artichokes were crispy. I then divided half that pan between our plates, before adding balsamic vinegar and olive oil to the pan, mixing, and tossing the pan's contents over the salad leaves in the bowl, before transferring it all to the plates.

The salad was delicious, in the way that warm salads with bacon inevitably are; calling it a salad is probably a bit of a con, since it seems somewhere between salad and fry-up, but that has to be a good thing. Jamie suggests varying it with sausage instead of bacon - I can imagine it working well with garlicky Toulouse sausages and new potatoes replacing the artichokes. I might feel compelled to experiment.

Lovely crab linguine

2007-02-04T06:10:00.000-08:00

When I began this project, I had no idea what its implications might be. I knew, obviously, that it would mean cooking a lot of dishes that I'd never tried before and a few that might not immediately tantalize me, whereas my natural tendency is to ignore recipes that don't have instant page appeal. I've already commented on how liberating it is to discover that you shouldn't judge a recipe on a first glance. On the one hand, cooking through one book is limiting (there are all those other books out there, calling me..); on the other, it opens up avenues that other books would not, because I simply wouldn't take them if I hadn't resolved to do so in advance. I insisted I wouldn't count, but I have now made over a hundred recipes from Cook with Jamie and that feels like an achievement. The corollary of that success is, of course, that I am reaching the end of certain sections of the book, which means that it is going to be increasingly difficult to 'cook with Jamie' every day. Watch this space for Life After Jamie (so to speak). For now, I have finished the dried pasta section; it is unsurprising that this is the first section of the book to be completed because dried pasta really is the ultimate everyday food, ideal for the home cook with a job to do as well as dinner to make.

I say that pasta is everyday food, but crab linguine doesn't feel like the culinary equivalent of a pair of worn slippers; it sounds simple but elegant (maybe the food version of a beaded flipflop: comfy but stylish). The book says that it is a classic on the menu at Fifteen (where I still haven't been, by the way, but I will definitely go). It also recommends buying freshly picked crabmeat, which I've managed to do lately by stopping off at the fishmonger on Thursday evenings (late night opening). To make the dish, I smashed up fennel seeds and mixed with chopped red chilli, lemon zest and juice, shaved fennel, extra virgin olive oil, white and brown crabmeat (more white than brown) and seasoning. This mixture warmed through in a bowl sitting on top of the pasta pan as the water came to the boil, while I shaved some asparagus spears lengthways. When the pasta water was ready, I moved the crab mixture and cooked the linguine before draining it and tossing it with the crab mixture, adding a little reserved pasta cooking water to lighten the sauce. To serve I divided it between pasta bowls and added fennel tops and the asparagus spears dressed with a little oil and lemon.

This dish is surprisingly delicate - it would work really well as a spring/summer dish, but it is probably good all year round. It is more sophisticated than most pasta suppers, but it certainly isn't difficult and is definitely repeatable. The flavour of the crab comes through very clearly, so people who are ambivalent about shell-fish should definitely beware. The sauce is light and unobtrusive; it coats, rather than clags, the linguine, in a seductive sort of way.

Having finished the dried pasta section, I should really name my favourites. I wouldn't rank them; food is a matter not just of personal taste, but also of the frame of mind you were in when you ate it. I can honestly say that I enjoyed all of the dried pasta dishes, but the recipes that stood out most were the spaghetti with mussels in white wine and basil oil, the fabulous honeycomb cannelloni and finally the truly fantastic fish lasagne, which is genuinely different and absolutely divine. Anyone who hasn't tried it, it is honestly a dinner to rave about - perfect dinner-party fare but also comforting and tasty even without any guests.

My favourite crunchy squid with lime and chilli mayonnaise

2007-02-01T10:57:00.000-08:00

I'm scared of deep-frying. I know I'm not alone; there are probably therapy sessions to teach nervy souls like me how to cope with a deep fat-fryer, but I'm not about to enrol on one. This fear dates back to my childhood when I used to rush out of the kitchen whenever the deep fat fryer was turned on; the sizzling fat did more to put me off cooking than school dinners, even. I've always been a scaredy-cat sort of person. Simon does the deep fat frying in our house, although to be honest we don't eat deep-fried food much (which has to be a good thing). Yesterday we bought some squid and decided to make Jamie's crunchy squid, which is effectively a euphemism for deep-fried squid, but sounds less off-putting to the health police. It goes with lime and chilli mayonnaise, which is enough reason to make it - who could resist lime and chilli mayo? As I wrote that last, apparently rhetorical, question, I realized that my friend Litlove will be recoiling in horror as she reads this. Litlove is even more squeamish than me. Quite a lot more sqeamish than me, in fact. In the days when a friend of mine tested my stomach to its absolute limit with some seriously dodgy food, Litlove would listen to my stories and I could almost see her stomach churn in empathetic repulsion. Anyway, going back to last night's dinner, crunchy squid and lime and chilli mayo sounded perfect to me.

First, make the mayo: mix 4 heaped tablespoons of mayonnaise with chopped red chilli, lemon and lime zest and juice so that it is zingily citrussy.

Then toss the squid in seasoned flour and deep-fry at 180 C until crispy and golden. Drain on kitchen towel, season, and slice at an angle. Serve with the mayo.

The photo definitely doesn't do the dinner justice; squid isn't very photogenic and the mayo, thinned down with lemon and lime juice, was runny. Never mind - it was as yummy as deep fried food inevitably is; and the mayonnaise was delicious and will definitely be repeated. I served this as suggested with a root veg salad, the same one I made at the weekend. The combo worked pretty well and the veggies in the salad made me feel as though I wasn't breaking every health rule in the book. Oh, and I managed to stay in the kitchen while the squid sizzled dangerously. I must be overcoming some of my fears.

Roasted baby leeks with thyme

2007-01-31T11:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was one of those work days where everything that can possibly go wrong, does. I spent half of the day sorting out the impossible dilemma of how to screen a film for 60 students when one videocassette snapped, two were stolen and one was unmasked as an illegal copy and I was therefore banned from using it. British Amazon no longer stock this (French) film; even French Amazon had run out, and I was reduced to panicked pleas for help to colleagues all over the city, people I hadn't even met. The next problem was how to fit 55 students into a room that seated 40 (answer: steal chairs frantically and illicitly from a neighbouring room, and squeeze the students in like sardines; don't, on any account, alert any administrative system to this potential health and safety hazard). Then I contrived to partially lose my voice. A good start to a term, you might say. I came home dragging my feet, simultaneously exhausted and over-wired, longing to forget the day and yet unable to. I have yet to learn the art of zen; I do worrying so much better.

Anyway I did manage to make dinner, cooking being one way I destress (another one is to sink into a hot bath with a novel); I smeared cod fillets in sundried tomato paste and basil leaves, wrapped in parma ham and baked. (This is a rip-off easy version of the stellar monkfish in parma ham from Happy Days, which is a fantastic recipe) I also made Jamie's roasted baby leeks with thyme from Cook with Jamie. Wash and trim baby leeks, blanch for 2-3 minutes in boiling salted water, drain, then toss with olive oil, red wine vinegar, sliced garlic cloves and thyme leaves. Roast in an oven preheated to 200C for about 10 minutes until golden and caramelized.

I was a bit underwhelmed by this recipe. It's not that different from the whole-baked carrots recipe I tried recently, which I really liked; this one was nice, but it didn't really excite me much. This may be because baby leeks aren't in season - mine were dodgy imports. It may be because leeks just aren't exciting enough to warrant a blog entry. It is probably also because my boiled potatoes were a boring accompaniment. Anyway the leeks were nice enough that I would make them again if I had baby leeks, but wouldn't go out of my way to buy those leeks again - until spring/summer, when I promise I will give them a go in their correct seasonal setting. I have been breaking seasonal rules for this project and perhaps this is nature seeking its revenge. In any case, dinner did me good. It stopped me fretting about rooms and videos and pieces of paper and reminded me that work doesn't have to shadow me all day long like a persistent ghost; it can and should be laid to rest. I need to remember that when I wake up at 3 am with raging toothache fretting about the practicalities of the working day to come.

Tea-party fairy cakes

2007-01-30T10:22:00.000-08:00

Where are all the tea parties? So many cookbooks have sections devoted to tea parties and when celebrities are interviewed they often extol the virtues of afternoon tea. I never get invited to tea parties. In fact, I think my one and only tea party was when I was a student and an American exchange girl liked the idea of an English afternoon tea, so she invited everyone round for outsized mismatched and chipped student-style mugs of PG Tips, with chewy Sainsburys scones, a Sara Lee chocolate cake and a packet of digestives; we sat around on the floor and on the bed, because she didn't have a table. She called it afternoon tea, but it was just a formalization of normal student behaviour - that is, sitting around drinking endless mugs of tea and eating biscuits (no one should be surprised that we moved seamlessly from tea to gin and tonic, and eventually onto the local pub when the gin bottle ran dry). Hardly afternoon tea as I imagine it, with delicate, crustless cucumber sandwiches, homemade scones with jam and clotted cream, Earl Grey in little china tea cups, and doilies (there has to be doilies. I don't own any doilies, but I do recall biscuits appearing on doilies during my childhood). Anyone out there who wants to invite me to afternoon tea, please feel free - I've been missing out. Although I'm not entirely sure how afternoon tea fits into a busy working schedule...

These musings are not entirely irrelevant to fairy cakes, because Jamie points out that they are great to serve at tea parties. I can't imagine Jamie at a tea party. The photo is incongruous, of a tiered cake stand with cutesy little cupcakes in shades of pink; it doesn't look like the sort of picture you would tend to find in a Jamie cookbook. The icing is not immaculately smooth, though, which it might be in a different kind of book; moreover, the icing has fresh fruit in it, which raises these little cakes up a notch, or at least sets them apart a bit from the standard fairy cakes that everyone can make.

At the risk of sounding like a fairy cake bore, which I am not, all fairy cakes are not the same. Nigella's fairy cakes, which I usually make, contain milk and vanilla extract; Jamie's have lemon instead, and you can taste the lemon in his sponge, which makes a difference (I don't know which I prefer. They're just different). The sponge recipe is the same as for the Victoria sponge
that I made recently, so I won't repeat it; the difference here is simply using bun tins and cooking for a little less time. The icing is the interesting part: mash up some fresh berries (raspberries, strawberries or blackberries) and mix with icing sugar, then drizzle over. Jamie suggests adding crystallized fruit petals for decoration, but I used a heart-shaped bun tin so I thought mine were cutesy enough.

The fresh fruit icing is unsurprisingly delicious, much nicer than plain icing; mine was runny, as you can see, because I wanted a lot of fruit in the icing (Jamie's is runny too). The only problem is that the fresh fruit icing doesn't last long, which means you have to eat them up quickly - in some ways that isn't such a problem since they taste good and are little mouthfuls of sweetness. I only made half the suggested recipe amount, and gave some away immediately...

I like cupcakes, fairy cakes, whatever you want to call them, because I like food in miniature; I prefer cupcakes to muffins. Sometimes in a coffee shop the muffins look obscenely enormous and off-putting, whereas a cupcake slides down easily. I made cupcakes for our wedding last year, because I had to work up until the evening before and didn't want to make a cake because we were having an untraditional wedding and would have had to carry uneaten cake to the next stage of the proceedings; it seemed a bit complicated. I liked the idea of the guests taking a little cake home each. Here are our wedding cakes:

I bought the stand (above) from an Ebay seller to hold the cupcakes for the wedding (it was a small wedding - only 26 of us). It occurs to me that I now have a cupcake stand, so maybe I should host an afternoon tea, and give in to my urge for crustless sandwiches and scones, and fragrant Earl Grey, plus fairy cakes, this time with the fresh fruit icing. Part of me sees afternoon tea as horribly upper class - and not only do I have no desire to be upper class, but also they wouldn't have me even if I did. That said, there is no reason why afternoon tea has to have anything to do with social class. After all, it is a truth universally acknowledged, as Jane Austen might have said but didn't quite, that everyone likes cupcakes.

Unbelievable root veg salad

2007-01-29T11:19:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to get irritated by the adjectives and superlatives in the recipe titles in this book - unbelievable, the best, the ultimate. It occurs to me that this can't go on for too long in Jamie recipeland because the next version of a dish will have to become the ultimate, and the recipes will end up cancelling each other out. I am a bit of a pedant secretly and that sort of thing can start to get to me. Having said that, I'd never made a root vegetable salad before; the idea wouldn't have entered my head, to be honest. I am a lazy salad-preparer; I tend to make a mustardy French dressing for green leaves (I cannot abide those mixed salads that people used to serve up, with cucumber and watery tomatoes) or, if it's just me, I just mix balsamic vinegar with olive oil or else (in my laziest moments) I squeeze lemon juice over rocket leaves and call it a salad (try it - it isn't that bad). Anyway, I liked the look of this root veg salad, not least because it was pretty colourful - and also because it uses seasonal vegetables, which I can buy from the farm shop and thus allow me to sleep at night without worrying that Hugh F-W will come and attack me for unethical purchasing. I got round to this salad yesterday - it seemed like a good idea for lunch, with some more baked Italian cheese; I was working on the (erroneous?) assumption that all those vegetables would cancel out the effects of the cheese, plus the chocolate tart I made later on.

The salad can, basically, involve any mixture of seasonal vegetables you like; the suggested range for autumn/winter is celery, carrots, beetroot, radicchio, radishes, fennel. (For anyone interested, baby asparagus, broad beans or baby courgettes are suggested for spring and summer). Slice or shave beetroot and carrots (I used a speed peeler), slice celery heart and leaves, radishes, radicchio and fennel. Toss in a grilled chilli dressing (grill red chillies, peel and deseed, toss with extra virgin olive oil, mint, lemon juice and seasoning) and serve sprinkled with fennel tops.

It's a pretty tasty salad, with interesting textures and the possibility for variation according to taste. It is both light and yet substantial; it feels superhealthy but the flavour is better than 'superhealthy' implies. Definitely a salad that suits the season and should be repeated!

Warmed grilled peach and frisee salad with goat's cheese dressing

2007-01-28T10:35:00.000-08:00

When I was an undergraduate finishing my degree, I remember a PhD student in maths met his wife-to-be on the Internet. He was an odd sort of character, not just in terms of appearance -long, greasy hair scraped back into a shaggy ponytail, receding hairline, egg-shaped face - but mainly in terms of behaviour; he used to stay up all night playing Doom and other computer games and talking to strangers on line. We had barely heard of the Internet then and the news that this character had 'met' an American woman on the net and planned to marry her even though they had never clapped eyes on each other in real life (although admittedly they spoke to each other on the telephone, too) was a source of passing entertainment. We all wondered what this woman would make of him when they finally met, but we never found out because he finished his degree and departed and none of us liked him sufficiently as to stay in touch and discover what came of it. In any case we all assumed that the only people who might want to meet others on the Internet would be the sort of people we didn't really want to know. I tell this apparently irrelevant story mainly to indicate the prejudices that have underpinned my attitude towards the net; for years, my only cyber communication was e-mail with people I knew already. Then Simon set up his own music internet forum and got to know a few people on-line; two turned out to be veering on the psychopathic, but one has become a very close friend, was a witness at our wedding, and - although she purports not to like cooking, makes the most divine chocolate tart ever. It became clear that the Internet is pretty much like the world that invented it, that is, it harbours a huge variety of people, not all of whom you will get on with, some of whom might be dangerous but most of whom are just people like you. It is the last part of this sentence that makes the Internet a fertile source of new friends: that is, you are more likely to find like-minded people because you meet them via blogs and forums that reflect your interests. I am a member of a couple of cooking forums and through them have 'met' (none in real life, so to speak) a range of people who get what I mean when I am delirious over my new Kitchenaid (whereas my friends think I need my head checking) and can swap recipes and - even - food. I have come across some oddballs and some people passing themselves off as other people, but I don't let them spill over into my real life and can just ignore them in cyber space (it's the real beauty of cyberspace for polite British people like me, who tend to find it difficult to ignore people in real life) and carry on. Them aside, I have also encountered some intensely generous and fascinating people that I'd never have come across without the Internet. I have also, recently, experienced that generosity crossing over into my real life. I've swapped food parcels with people all over the world in the last few months, and these cyber cyphers have turned out to be very generous people off their keyboards as well as on them. Recently I taped Nigella's Christmas Kitchen, which was on television in Britain but not elsewhere, onto DVD for Internet friends all over the world - OK, well in Europe, the US and Japan! - and since then these recipients have sent lovely gifts back in return. I've had lots of chocolate from Norway and Finland (you won't believe how good Scandinavian chocolate is, but it really is!), saffron from Spain (very fitting), chopsticks and tea and cookies from Japan, magazines and chocolate from France, lots of spices from the US, including stuff from Dean and Deluca (fab packaging) and Tex Mex spices (Mmm), and most bravely cheese, hams and pancetta from Italy. Yesterday I also received a loaf of olive bread from Freya as part of a cake swap we decided to do (yes, she turned it into a bread/cake swap, well spotted). With my non-Internet friends, I can't imagine a cake swap, or any kind of food swap at all, really, and so I find all this quite exciting.

Last night, to go with Jamie's grilled peach and frisee salad, I used ham and cheese from Italy and Freya's bread.

The salad first, since it is in the title of the post: make a goat's cheese dressing by mixing goats cheese with olive oil, lemon juice, then Parmesan and walnut oil. The instructions read oddly here. Jamie explicitly instructs you to use a pestle and mortar, but keeps saying 'whiz the mixture up' - the word whiz doesn't go with a pestle and mortar in my mind. Bash it up, maybe, but whiz it up means a food processor to me, so I dithered a bit and then used the small bowl of the Magimix to whiz up the goat's cheese with the olive oil and lemon, then stirred in the walnut oil and Parmesan. I then grilled the peaches, drizzled over a little olive oil and seasoned lightly. To make the salad, use the inner leaves of a frisee or endive lettuce, and toss in the goat's cheese dressing, grate over a little Parmesan and then serve. Scatter with baby mint leaves.

The salad is very good. This is one of those dishes I wouldn't have bothered with if I wasn't doing the project - and I would have missed out! The peach goes so well with the crunchy lettuce and the creamy dressing.

The Italian cheese I was sent this week is called tomali, from Piedmont, and has to be cooked. The sender, Claudia, suggested wrapping it in parma ham and putting it in a very hot oven, so I did - it was delicious, the sort of thing it is dangerous to start eating because you might never stop. Below, the salad and the cheese wrapped in parma ham:

I served this with Freya's olive bread, which was dense and chewy and really good. I'm sure she will write how she made it in her blog - well, I hope so, so that I can have a go myself! It would definitely be worth repeating.

The whole dinner worked beautifully, and half of it was food I had been sent, which made it taste even better. It is true that the supermarkets sell foods from all over the world now; we can get pomegranate molasses and za'atar and miso paste, for instance, and I tend to take that facility for granted. But receiving food gifts from other parts of the world, from real people, is a world apart from standing in the 'exotic' aisle in Tesco buying the ingredients for a recipe derived from a cookbook. It is about finding out what real people eat, it's about cultural exchange of a real sort (as opposed to the abstract nonsense talked by most politicians) and it's about making connections, comparisons, and opening up your mind as well as your taste buds.

My mother-in-law remains highly suspicious of Internet-founded friendships; if she knew we'd been eating food sent by apparent strangers, she would probably warn us off in fear that we were being poisoned by Internet-dwelling serial killers (since she assumes that anyone who uses the net is a potential psychopath). I am sure that the Internet has its share of undesirables, but it's not so difficult to spot and steer clear of them - and in any case, I am more likely to be poisoned by the deep-frying fetishists who cater for all work events round here (the company who cater for us at work make turkey twizzlers. Go figure..). To all these disembodied Internet people who've made January into a second Christmas for me - thank you very much; you've enriched this dark, cold and most miserable month of the year immeasurably.

Crispy fragrant jumbo prawns

2007-01-27T10:37:00.000-08:00

Thursday night is late-night shopping here, which means that the high street stores close at eight or nine rather than at six in the evening (hardly late-night, but late enough to allow me a chance to browse after work). I like shopping, even if admitting it to my colleagues earns me raised eyebrows and ill-disguised contempt (most of them eschew the city for nature and muddy walks, and despise shopping to the point that one colleague even sends other people to buy her clothes and shoes...), but then what they don't understand is that I like to wander around looking almost as much as I like to buy. In fact, I often come home empty-handed or simply with a book or two (I don't count books, since they denote necessity rather than luxury in my financial code). Anyway on Thursday I went to pick up the almond cream Kitchenaid blender that I had ordered on Wednesday - it was on sale, and I simply couldn't resist it. I had a blender already, so this was sheer profligacy, but it does go beautifully with my mixer and it is more sophisticated than my previous blender (which I am going to give to a friend whose blender was broken by her accident-prone mother). En route to collect the blender, we stopped at the fishmongers and bought some raw medium sized prawns; we knew we wouldn't have lots of time to cook when we got home and this breadcrumbed prawn dish seemed ideal for a night when you hit the kitchen running.

First, whizz white bread into breadcrumbs, then mix with chopped parsley, lemon zest, olive oil and Parmesan and lay the mixture on a tray to dry.

Toss the prawns in seasoned flour, then dip into whisked egg, then coat in the breadcrumbs. It is assembly line cooking, doesn't require a great deal of thought, and is pretty speedy. Place the crumbed prawns on an oiled baking tray and bake for 10 minutes or so until crispy and golden at 220C.

Sprinkle the prawns with salt and serve with rocket dressed with lemon juice and olive oil; serve with lemon quarters.

Jamie's photo shows a very restrained serving, with two huge prawns and just a few rocket leaves. My prawns were smaller but also we were eating this as a main meal (with bread), so I upped the quantities of both prawns and rocket (I am a tad obsessive about eating enough greens). I also used lemon salt to season both flour and prawns, to heighten the flavour. It was absolutely delicious - a dinner to repeat, definitely; Jamie suggests using squid, scallops or sardines as alternatives, which could also be good to try - and it was all so quickly done! Fast food again.

(In case anyone's interested and as an aside, I have tried out the blender. We had smoothies this morning - raspberries and blueberries blitzed with apple juice and yoghurt. They were pretty invigorating.)

Gnocchi with braised oxtail

2007-01-25T11:01:00.000-08:00

For some reason, gnocchi has always filled me with fear. I could never see why the little potato cylinders didn't just disintegrate into the cooking water and had a vision that if I made them, that might well happen. Yesterday evening, then, I was psyching myself up for disaster. I was also in a good mood because I bought a new cookbook - I know, I know, I need some sort of therapy - this time Jo Pratt's book, In the Mood for Food. It is gloriously and unashamedly girly, with a pink cover and enticing sections like 'lazy food' and 'extravagant food' and 'romantic food', as well as hangover breakfasts and the most seductive ice cream and chocolate sections. I came home, put potatoes into the oven to bake to make gnocchi, and read my new book. In my defence, I had already made the oxtail stew that the gnocchi accompanies in this particular recipe and thus half of the work was already out of the way. Nonetheless there remained the nagging worry that I might mess the gnocchi up, exacerbated because I felt that Jamie's book could give more details of amounts and method and therefore turned to Giorgio Locatelli, who warns that small amounts of gnocchi dough are notoriously difficult to work with, which in turn scared me further.

Fear aside, the gnocchi turned out fine. I scooped the potato flesh out of the baked potatoes and Simon mashed them; we added nutmeg powder and egg yolk and then pasta flour, until the mixture felt like dough. Then we tore a piece off and tested it; miraculously it didn't fall apart. I teased the dough into 2 sausage shapes, cut each one at 2.5 cm intervals as instructed, and transferred to a floured baking tray to set in the fridge for 10-20 minutes. Finally I boiled the gnocchi for a few minutes and served over the oxtail stew.

To make the stew, I seared an oxtail until brown all over, adding celery, leek, onion, and carrot and cooking until golden brown. I then added white wine, crushed fennel seeds and juniper berries, a crushed dried red chilli, tomato puree and tinned plum tomatoes. I removed from the oven and lifted the meat out of the stew, shredding the meat off the bone, and replacing it in the pot. I added oregano and simmered for 15 minutes.

Everything came out as it should, I think. The gnocchi were delicious - light and tasty. The stew was a real winter warmer, with all the flavour you'd expect from oxtail. I feel as though I have jumped another hurdle in food terms, although admittedly one successful batch of gnocchi doesn't actually mean that I am the gnocchi expert. Still, I am making progress, and that was part of what my project was all about. I suppose I might have to tackle meringues soon, and they really scare me, not least because I don't like them that much so I've never particularly wanted to try. I will, though - what I've learnt recently is to suspend prejudice and try things, and see how they turn out.

Sctoch stovie (again!)

2007-01-24T12:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I returned to the dentist to have my tricky tooth checked out and to have a small filling in the other side of my mouth. The filling was fine, but left me with half of my mouth numb and the other half still in pain from before, which made eating logistically impossible. The tooth that has plagued me for the last five weeks apparently (according to my dentist) just 'needs time to bed down'; if it doesn't 'settle' (again, his words, not mine) then the choices are root canal work or extraction. You can imagine how cheered I felt as I left the dentist. Worse than that, though, I felt somewhat despairing, because the television was on in the waiting-room (which also irritates me, because it distracts from reading or planning classes, which is what I was trying to do), showing a programme I'd never seen but that appeared to be a British version of Jerry Springer, with an argument over which of two men was the father of a baby leading to a DNA test, the results of which were delivered live to the studio. I know these programmes exist; I used to watch their predecessors (Kilroy, Vanessa, eventually Trisha) sometimes when I was a student and kept the television on as wallpaper while I wrote endless essays. I just choose not to watch them because they are so disheartening and distasteful. One man didn't want to be the father and turned out to be; the other, who had been looking after the baby, was longing to be the biological father and of course wasn't. Both cried; the mother was stony-faced (apart from when she threatened to beat up her best friend for a crime I can't recall). I was almost glad to begin the dental work simply to get away from the vile programme (which seemed to be called the Jeremy Kyle show or something akin) and the message it was sending me about contemporary British society. I was less repulsed by the characters exposing their sordid lives on camera than the idea that people actually watch this kind of charade. A lot of daytime television is trash, admittedly, but what's wrong with the sort of frothy This Morning format for mindless entertainment?

Fastforwarding a full day's work to last night, I decided to make Scotch stovies again. I had made them once before but they didn't colour properly; apparently I didn't brown the onion for long enough. This time, I was more careful. The method is described here from my last attempt, so I won't go through it all again. Suffice it to say that this time I got more colour, although not as much as Jamie's picture.

It didn't matter - the stovie was really nice, very tasty. We served it with hake fillets topped with tapenade and baked in the oven (a simplification of a Rick Stein recipe), plus spinach and it worked well as a combination for an easy weekday dinner. Fortunately my mouth was no longer numb so I could appreciate it.

Here's to hoping that the tricky tooth 'settles in' soon!

Raviol(in)i of celeriac and thyme

2007-01-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

According to my Grower's Market book, celeriac is 'an unpromising-looking brute of a vegetable'. That description strikes me as a tad unfair, given that few root vegetables would win first prize in a beauty contest, but I see what the writer is getting at. Celeriac does look brutish, in some ways; it looks tough, in any case, butch and uncompromising, compared with, say, the sylph-like grace of an asparagus tip or the subtle prettiness of purple sprouting broccoli. Yet celeriac is far less scary than it looks - it makes wonderful mash, for instance, and it works well roasted, too. I hadn't tried it as a filling for ravioli until yesterday, in fact, I'd never have considered it until I saw the idea in Jamie's book, but then, we've only been making our own ravioli since August so we are still relative novices, with countless potential ravioli fillings left to try out.

This time, the pasta was made with pureed spinach as well as with eggs and flour. I used baby spinach and cooked it very briefly before pureeing it; larger-leafed spinach leaves would have been cooked for longer and yielded a stronger colour, but I was using what I had.

The filling is made as follows: for enough for four people, cook diced celeriac with thyme leaves, seasoning and a little olive oil on a high heat until the celeriac has some colour, then turn the heat down to medium and add chopped garlic and chilli, cooking for another 3 or 4 minutes. Add boiling water, cover the pan and cook on a low heat for 20-25 minutes, untl the celeriac is soft and the water has evaporated. Smash the celeriac up with a potato masher and cool before filling the pasta.

At this stage, we cheated. Jamie stipulates raviolini, not ravioli, but we were hungry and time was marching on, so we made it into ravioli instead, which is quicker.

I should pause at this moment and say that when we bought the pasta machine (a manual Imperia one) there was a flicker of doubt in my mind as to how often we would use it. I know some people with pasta makers use them once and then effectively consign them to the Gadget Graveyard and I hoped we wouldn't. I can safely say that it was worth its weight in gold. I love fresh homemade pasta (that so-called 'fresh pasta' sold in the supermarkets bears no resemblance to it) and Jamie's recipes for it are inventive and tasty. I am not an experimental cook - I follow recipes, don't make them up myself - but I think I will start inventing fillings for ravioli, which may or may not work! This ravioli, though, was delicious, a pleasure to eat - and a funky colour to boot.

Best whole baked carrots (and a chocolate cake)

2007-01-22T10:51:00.000-08:00

Anyone with a good memory (and nothing better to fill it with...) might remember that I made these carrots last Sunday night but the photo was deleted before I had a chance to upload it onto the PC. I don't want to blog without images because a) it might make people think I am hallucinating all these lovely meals while living on beans on toast and b) I can witter happily about how good food tasted but it is much easier to imagine it when you see it and c) I like the visual record that helps me to remember dishes when I look back. Yesterday I made the baked carrots again, only with orange carrots this time, not purple; this inevitably means that they look a bit less exciting (mind you, I am pushing it to put carrots and exciting in the same sentence in any case).

These carrots are a doddle to make: buy some young, bunched carrots, scrub them, toss them with olive oil, a splash of red wine vinegar, crushed garlic and thyme leaves, put in an oven dish, cover with foil, bake for 30-40 minutes, remove foil, and put back in oven for 10 minutes. Simplicity itself.

They looked better when they were purple, but the orange variety tasted just as good. Funny to think that once upon a time purple was a standard carrot colour...

We ate the carrots as part of a roast pork dinner, photographed below (before I poured gravy over - my favourite bit).

I know that food bloggers the world over participate in SugarHigh Friday. I never seem to be sufficiently awake on Fridays to join in! Instead, I have my own, Kathryn-shaped Cake Sunday, when I bake for us and for the week ahead (random colleagues get to benefit from the results). Yesterday I joined in another cookalong from an MSN group I am part of; we are cooking from Nigella's How to Eat and I leapt on the chance to make her chocolate birthday cake. It wasn't anyone's birthday, but that cake is too divine to save for special occasions - it has proper chocolate in as well as cocoa powder, and condensed milk (spooky but good) and is covered in chocolate ganache. It was, incidentally, the first cake I ever made, back in the days when I didn't bake cakes. I was incredibly proud of it and I partially blame that cake for my eventual conversion to cooking. So yesterday, I made it again. This time, I wanted to play a bit, so we made some butter icing and piped white smears over the dark ganache - we need to practise our piping skills but it looked quite pretty with the contrasting dark and white.

I like cakes that are resolutely cakey, rather than too wet, but they run the risk of being dry; this one is both cakey and moist (the condensed milk factor?).

It strikes me as amusing that I began this post with carrots and ended with chocolate cake. I think that sums up my eating habits quite well, though, on reflection; I do eat a lot of vegetables, but I also - ahem - eat cake.

Return of the egg salad

2007-01-21T10:29:00.000-08:00

I don't think I used to eat the much-scorned egg salad of my childhood. I don't remember avoiding it, but I am sure I must have been side-stepping it skilfully, because it is definitely the sort of thing I wouldn't have eaten. I preferred boiled eggs and soldiers, in those days, out of my Noddy egg cup (I gather that Noddy and Big Ears are un-PC these days. What a shame. I loved Enid Blyton and I am sure she inspired my passion for reading, even if her female characters all stayed in the house and helped Mother while the boys helped Father in the garden - remember the Faraway Tree?). I decided on this dish because we bought very fresh eggs this morning at the farm shop and the photo caught my eye, but I was resigned to not liking it that much before I began; I presumed it would probably be a bit too eggy for me. We were going into town this afternoon, to shop (which for me means meandering from bookshop to bookshop, punctuated by the odd clothes shop, Lakeland, and the kitchenware department of Fenwicks) and didn't have much time to prepare lunch, which was fine because this egg salad was as fast as can be.

We boiled the eggs in slightly salted water, refreshed them in cold water, drained, peeled and halved them, before drizzling over some lemon-spiked mayonnaise. We served with toast and rashers of pancetta.

A couple of our eggs were a bit over-boiled; others were just right. I tucked in with a smidgen of wariness, but they were nice - the lemony mayo really worked with the eggs.

This experience made me think about the extent to which fashion prevails in terms of what we eat. I suppose this might mean we miss out on a lot of dishes that people loved in the past, but in practice it probably doesn't because fashions in food as in clothes have a habit of returning, slightly modified, but in more or less familiar form. Fashions arise partly because we are fickle, grow tired of the familiar and want to branch into something more exciting, but then it would seem that we miss the past, or we miss its familiarity, and thus we embrace the once-forgotten foodstuff on its second or third time around. I think the important thing for me is to be open-minded, because I greet these retro foods with a degree of suspicion. I can eat sushi and seaweed with the best of them, but I am still repulsed by rice pudding (memories of school and the skin that formed on top). I am not afraid of the new or the foreign, but I am terrified of the old foods that made me retch during school lunchtimes and that made me hide behind the settee refusing to go to school until I was allowed to take packed lunches. I wonder what would have happened if Jamie had come to my school - I suspect I would have staged a hunger strike. All that said, I have now eaten egg salad and am proud of it; I will probably, even, eat it again.

Southern Indian crab curry

2007-01-20T10:11:00.000-08:00

Friday night in our house is, as I've said before, very frequently curry night. Sometimes this means takeaway; other times I feel like cooking it myself (curry isn't difficult to make, but on Fridays I often prefer to inhabit the living room rather than the kitchen. The rest of the time, the kitchen feels like my space). Yesterday, I had decided to cook and bought some freshly picked crabmeat in preparation for this curry, but my throat began to hurt on the way home from work and I realized I was coming down with a cold. I used to get colds a lot - at university, they struck me down fairly regularly, as soon as the holidays began, and when I first began to teach then I inevitably caught a cold in Fresher's week (commonly known as Freshers' Flu) along with all the new undergraduates. More recently I have been careful to ward that off by stoking up my vitamin C levels and not opening my mouth too wide when in the same room as alcohol-dulled and sleep-deprived Freshers, making the most of their first time away from home. I haven't had many colds in the last couple of years (touching wood as I write this); Simon catches colds more than me these days. I am, however, not entirely immune and last night I found myself with a scratchy throat and runny nose - that is, in the condition I like to describe as 'cold-infested'.

Cold notwithstanding, the crab curry turned out to be easy and quick. Fry fennel seeds, black mustard seeds, cardamom pods (crushed and husks removed), cumin seeds, chopped ginger, garlic, onion and red chilli until lightly golden; add turmeric, butter and brown crabmeat. After a minute add coconut milk and water; simmer for five minutes, then add lemon juice and simmer for around 10 minutes. Stir in some coriander and white crabmeat and simmer for a few minutes, check the seasoning and add more lemon juice if you like, then serve sprinkled with more coriander leaves.

In the book, Jamie's curry looks brown-ish; mine is more yellow, possibly because I was, as usual, converting a recipe for 4-6 to serve 2 and didn't pay attention to the turmeric, and also I didn't have any black mustard seeds and had to use standard ones. That aside, I like the bright and fresh appearance of this curry and it tasted fragrant and light, an elegant and vibrant sort of curry. I would make this again with prawns instead of or as well as crab, I think.

Mussels steamed with fennel and creme fraiche

2007-01-19T10:24:00.000-08:00

Three months ago, Simon tasted (and liked!) his first mussel, tested in Jamie's recipe for spaghetti with mussels and basil oil. Thankfully he wasn't scared off and has turned himself into a guinea pig par excellence for seafood. I love mussels and would take up any excuse to eat them, except that I do find cleaning and debearding them a bit tiresome. Mussels I buy seem to be very hairy and I wouldn't like to taste a strand of mussel beard in the scrumptious white wine and cream sauces that invariably accompany them. Yesterday I made it to the fishmongers after work (late night shopping on Thursday) and we could therefore have mussels for dinner. It is no surprise by now that there is fennel in this dish - Jamie's favourite ingredient, or so it would seem. There is also creme fraiche and white wine, which are two of my favourite ingredients, particularly together...

To make this dish: for four people, chop half a fennel bulb and an onion. Sweat them with 4 chopped cloves of garlic, leaves of 2 sprigs of fresh thyme and 1-2 crumbled dried red chilli, until soft. Turn up the heat and add 1 kg mussels, 340 ml creme fraiche and 1 large glass white wine. Mix together vigorously, put the lid on, let it cook for a couple of minutes, check it, shake the pan, wait until mussels open and then lift them into bowls with a slotted spoon. Season with salt and pepper. Check the sauce; if it needs thickening put it back on the heat, season and then pour over the mussels. Sprinkle with fennel tops plus the other half of the fennel used earlier, shaved finely, and some drizzled olive oil. Serve with warm crusty bread and white wine.

Mussels don't look as good as they taste, do they? They were delicious though - the sauce was divine. I loved the aniseedy sourness of the creamy sauce; it was perfect. We ate it with crusty bread and scooped up the sauce left once the mussels had gone with hunks of the bread. I am now, predictably, fantasizing about a trip to France for moules-frites (amongst other things).

Roasted cauliflower with cumin, coriander and almonds

2007-01-18T10:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we had a work 'away day', a bizarre term for a bi-annual event that takes us away from our desks and individual offices with the main aim of making us talk to each other with no means of escape. For years, this event was held in a wildlife area just outside the city, inconveniently distanced from most forms of public transport to ensure we didn't plan a getaway at any point; recently it has been held in different city venues, which are more accessible but also seem to specialize in deep-fried chicken dippers for lunch. Anyway after a day trapped in a hotel with all of my colleagues, I needed to get into the kitchen when I got home and cook off its effects. I had already decided to make a diced lamb recipe from Rachel Allen to go with Jamie's spicy cauliflower recipe; I just had to work out some side dishes. I settled on couscous, wholemeal pitta, and yoghurt to go with the lamb and cauliflower, so that the meal had a sort of Moroccan vibe, although to be honest the cauliflower was more Indian.

To make the spicy roast cauliflower, I cut it into florets and steamed it briefly, before leaving it to steam-dry. Meanwhile I bashed up cumin and coriander seeds plus dried red chilli in my pestle and mortar, adding salt and blanched almonds, and toasting the mixture lightly, adding the cauliflower and, once it has coloured a little, some lemon juice and zest. I transferred the pan to the oven (preheated to 200C) for 15 minutes.

I have roasted cauliflower before, dusted with cumin, and liked it, but this tasted more complex and had more depth. It tasted good and it was easy enough to make.

I also as I said above made lamb with raisins and pine nuts from Rachel Allen - heat some oil in a pan, fry some diced lamb, add cumin and coriander (both ground), fry for 5 minutes, then add pine nuts, home made hummus, raisins and chopped coriander. Serve with couscous and pitta.

The whole meal worked pretty well - a nice different midweek supper with a bit of spice.

As a mid-week treat, I made gateaux choco-granola from Ma petite robe noire by Trish Deseine - a chocolate biscuit base with chocolate and creme fraiche set on top using a silicone muffin tin. I reduced amounts and used a silicone heart-shaped bun tin, making one for each of us. Mmm...

Slow-cooked leek soldiers with bacon

2007-01-17T11:28:00.000-08:00

According to Leanne Kitchen, whose book I'm reading intermittently at the moment - it's called Grower's Market: Cooking with Seasonal Produce, is half price in Borders at the moment and has extremely interesting commentaries on almost all fruit and veg that you could imagine - leeks used to be very highly esteemed and still are in some cultures. In ours, leeks often, she points out, end up relegated to the soup or stock pot, despised in their own right. I like leeks and am happy to do my bit to give the leek some recognition. My long-term leek recipe comes from Nigella Lawson and involves leeks, butter and white wine; I vaguely recall that she says this is a German technique, but I could be wrong. Anyway I haven't really ventured beyond this in leek-preparation and welcomed the chance to try something new. The title of the recipe (leek soldiers) also appealed to me because it looked and sounded a bit different and in vegetable terms I am always trying to vary my repertoire and pep up our meals a bit. I love vegetables (can't think of one I don't care for) and I like to mix them up a bit; there's nothing worse than steamed broccoli, say, three days in a row, however virtuous it may sound.

Jamie's slow-cooked leek soldiers with bacon serves 6-8. I know I should have waited to cook this for 6-8 people but I was impatient and, in any case, I rarely cater for that many people. Anyway I did the complicated maths and planning, and made it for two. To make this dish for 6-8 people: trim the ends of 12 leeks and discard the outer layers; cut off the dark green parts, slice and wash them, and fry in a little olive oil with garlic, thyme and a knob of butter for about 10 minutes; spread them over the bottom of an oven-proof dish. Cut the white sections of the leeks into 5cm pieces and pack them tightly into the dish on top of the garlic, thyme and green leek mixture. Add a wineglass of white wine and 285 ml chicken/vegetable stock and lay the bacon rashers over the top, before covering with dampened scrunched greaseproof and then foil. Cook in an oven preheated to 200C for about an hour, remove the foil and greaseproof and replace in the oven for 30 minutes or until the bacon is crisp and golden.

Hmm. It is probably now you've seen the photographic evidence that I have to admit that my soldiers didn't all stand to attention. This is because I didn't have the right sized dish for the number of leeks appropriate for 2 people to eat with pork chops and sweet potato mash. Stupid, I know, but my individual pie dishes were too small and everything else too big. I went for too big and some of my leeks, not tightly packed in at all, toppled over. I still found it pretty.

When it is ready, remove the bacon and chop it up, sprinkling it over the leeks.

My leeks might not all have remained standing, but once served up and sprinked with bacon noone would be able to tell. The leeks are delicious - the winey juices, plus the bacon fat, make them incredibly tasty. Bacon tends to do that to vegetables.

This is certainly a vegetable dish to repeat, even if the leeks topple over due to the wrong sized dish. The pork chops are, incidentally, cooked according to a Hugh F-W recipe in his Meat book, with garlic and then white wine. They were pretty good too. A nice, homely weekday dinner, which I would definitely make again.

Steamed broccoli with beurre blanc

2007-01-16T11:27:00.000-08:00

This was intended to be a post about whole baked carrots - purple, to boot - and I was half-way through when Simon confessed that he had deleted the photo from the digital camera before I managed to upload it onto the computer. This is the first time that this has happened and we had a debate/argument as to whether I should blog it without a photo or not. I didn't and don't want to because I want visual proof that I made these dishes and didn't hallucinate them, whereas Simon is more chilled about the whole thing and can't see why I insist on photographic evidence. I won because it's my blog, but I'm not sure I convinced my lovely husband. Never mind: I will repeat the carrot dish another time (it's nothing particularly special, but it's nice) and for today, I will turn to last night's dinner - steamed broccoli with beurre blanc.

Beurre blanc is probably a Weightwatchers nightmare - for 4 people, Jamie suggests 170g butter. It makes a huge slice of cake seem almost saintly... I have made beurre blanc before, following Rick Stein's recipe for grilled seabass (with crispy skin - mmm) and beurre blanc; I can't begin to describe how good that is. This time, Jamie pairs beurre blanc with broccoli, which, let's be honest, could do with an injection of flavour (I write as one who likes broccoli). Once my parents invited Simon's parents for a weekend lunch when the latter were up from Devon staying with us, and one of the vegetables served was broccoli. Simon's dad, never known for his table tact, mused 'broccoli is a very boring vegetable, isn't it?' I know what he means, but actually I like broccoli - and even so, it can only benefit from some luscious beurre blanc.

Everyone knows how to make beurre blanc (put white wine, chopped shallot, herbs (parsley and tarragon) and peppercorns into a pan, bring to the boil, and simmer until reduced by half, before removing from the heat. Pour through a sieve into a bowl over a pan of water on a low heat and add cubes of cold butter one at a time, whisking continuously. Use at once or carry on whisking over the pan of water (if you don't, it may split). Jamie has an alternative method - pour boiling water into a Thermos flask, drain, and sieve the wine liquid into it, adding the butter, putting the lid on and shaking. That way you can keep the sauce warm in the flask until you're ready to serve it.

Genius idea, clearly, since it removes the fear of the sauce splitting and the need to prepare it at the last minute. Genius idea unless you mess it up, which we almost did. Simon uncovered our flask (missing, presumed dead...) and poured in boiling water, draining it and then following instructions. But when he opened the lid, the butter began to ooze over the top. We think perhaps we should have left the boiling water in the flask slightly longer, or let it settle before we opened the lid; we aren't sure. After that, however, it seemed to work (although there was less of it, which may be a good thing for our arteries).

It was as nice as beurre blanc has to be (butter, wine, herbs... heaven, really) and it worked well with the broccoli (although I do prefer it with the grilled seabass - expensive tastes, me). I know the butter looks a bit bright in the photo but it wasn't quite that lurid yellow in real life. I will definitely try the flask trick again because it was a winner (well, after we'd spilt some, that is). I might even try serving it this way to my father-in-law, and see how he reacts.

Middle Eastern duck salad

2007-01-15T10:27:00.000-08:00

I wrote yesterday that I used one roast duck as the basis for two recipes (I am still mentally patting myself on the back for thriftiness and for avoiding leftovers to clutter up our already space-challenged freezer). I should, however, have remembered that although the duck was the alleged star of this salad, its place was somewhat usurped by a pomegranate. I know pomegranates are uber-trendy, thanks at least partially to Nigella's championing of them; I know that I am probably the last person to jump onto the pomegranate wagon. I don't know why I haven't bought pomegranates before, because the seeds are like little jewels, and I can't resist beautiful food. All I can say is that I brought 2 pomegranates home, one of which was going towards this salad; the other I bought because it worked out cheaper to buy two, and because I had a sense that pomegranates were going to become my new craze. Anything bright and shiny - with the bonus of unquestioned status as a superfood - is always likely to hold my attention (I am irresistibly drawn to shiny red patent leather shoes, although I would never buy any). I cut the pomegranate in half and smacked it with a wooden spoon cut-side down; the seeds mainly tumbled as they were supposed to into the bowl I'd placed beneath, but some of the juices squirted sideways and one jet sprayed my pale blue cardigan. That will teach me not to wear an apron. Nigella has a pomegranate recipe called 'massacre in a snowstorm' - I can see where that name came from. Leanne Kitchen helpfully tells us that pomegranate juice is so indelible that it is still used as a dye in the manufacture of Persian carpets. Perfect. Anyway, to move onto the next step of the recipe, I processed 1/3 of the pomegranate seeds with the juice of two tangerine halves and the insides of some preserved lemons, sieved this and added olive oil to make a dressing. I then mixed parsley and mint leaves with toasted flaked almonds, chopped pistachios, sour dried cherries, the skins of the preserved lemons alluded to above, the remaining pomegranate seeds and the lamb's lettuce and tossed in the dressing, adding the duck meat (shredded from the bone).

This was one of those meals that looks colourful and tastes equally vibrant; the nuts, greens and dried fruit, plus the superfood pomegranate, make it FEEL healthy, but it is incredibly tasty, like the most deliciously sinful treat. Jamie suggests it for a lazy summer lunch, but here I refuse to accept that I am being unseasonal because pomegranates are in season now. Mmm. I loved this salad; it had real zing and energy, and it gave me a bit too, which is miraculous in mid January.

One nitpicking point. Jamie says in the preamble that this is a salad with rocket. There's no rocket in the ingredients though - he suggests lamb's lettuce. Not that it matters, but I just wanted to point it out. In so doing, of course, I have revealed my secret anal side, reflected in my obsessively neat little handwriting and my precision in maths and planning - but belied by the part of me that likes to lie around reading novels and won't read the instruction manual on my new mobile phone, even though that means I don't know what all the functions are.

Gorgeous slow-cooked duck pasta

2007-01-14T08:31:00.000-08:00

Gorgeous slow-cooked duck pasta: if you read the ingredients, it isn't that far off the pot-roasted poussins agro-dolce that I made ages ago (well, in November - but that is ages ago in terms of the life-span of my project). Simon commented somewhat wistfully at Christmas that we don't eat the same thing twice very much at the moment - this is particularly odd for me because I am the sort of person who develops obsessions about food and I could easily eat the same thing every day for months before becoming suddenly repulsed by it and moving on to a new fad. That was how I was when I was little, in any case, but even as a grown-up foodie sort of person, I have always gone through phases. There was a phase when I made Jamie's parsnip and pancetta tagliatelle almost every week; the same happened more recently with his prawn, chilli and rocket pasta. At one point everyone who came for dinner got Nigella's seafood and pumpkin yellow curry; at another, it was her sage and onion chicken and sausage one-pot meal from Feast. I think these dishes all become, for a short period of time, my comfort blanket; they are always easy, week-night type dinners, often with store-cupboard ingredients, and I can manage them blind-folded. My staple week-night dinners very often involve dried pasta, most frequently with prawns, sometimes with bacon, because dried pasta is easy and convenient and because it is extremely warming food. Anything that can be eaten in a bowl instead of a plate, I would say, works to cocoon and to comfort - particularly in January, when purses are empty and holidays are a long way off. That is at least partly why I am probably statistically more likely to return to pasta recipes than any others; the other reasons are, predictably, time and convenience.

To make this dish, I roasted a duck that had been rubbed in olive oil, seasoned, and stuffed with orange quarters into its cavity. I actually used this duck as the basis for 2 recipes: this pasta dish and a Middle Eastern duck salad that I will write about tomorrow. This is because both recipes served at least four and we were two; it seemed like a sensible way to tackle two different duck recipes. Anyway, putting this aside and returning to the recipe for this dish as follows:

To make the sauce, I fried diced pancetta until golden, adding chopped onion, carrots, celery, rosemary, cinnamon stick and garlic and fried slowly for 10 mins until the vegetables softened. I added a tin of chopped tomatoes (for 2 people) and 1/4 bottle red wine and let it simmer for 25 minutes, before adding shredded duck meat and simmering for another half hour. If the sauce gets too thick, you can add stock or water (I added a little water). I removed the cinnamon stick and added sultanas and pine nuts.

Jamie suggests occhi di lupo or rigatoni pasta. I had neither in the house and Sainsburys had neither in stock, so I replaced with a tight spiralled pasta. When the pasta was cooked as per packet instructions, I tossed it into the sauce and stirred in butter, Parmesan, parsley, orange zest and juice and a good splash of vinegar. I loosened the sauce slightly with some cooking water and served.

The dish isn't very photogenic. I have noticed that pasta, like stews and curries, tastes a lot better than it looks. Desserts certainly have the aesthetic edge! Appearance apart, however, this is delicious. I said earlier that it isn't dissimilar to the ingredients for the poussins agro-dolce, but they included sun-dried tomatoes not standard tomatoes and somehow this tastes completely different. That dish was dark and sultry; this one is warm and cosy, and I like both.

I made a cake today too, for a friend of ours whose birthday it is tomorrow. She's a mini-egg fiend and Simon wanted her cake to reflect that, so I remembered Nigella's Easter cake recipe (which resembles a nest...). I'd never made it before but I knew other people had (and had seen photos); it is a craggy, flourless cake with a crater into which is scooped chocolate cream and then mini eggs. I include a photo because it ended up looking more or less pretty.

Thinking back to Simon's point about us not eating the same thing twice at the moment, I think that probably that is the main downside of the project. I try something one night, love it, think I want it again, immediately, then try something else the next night and forget the previous night's success. Fickle, me? Well, maybe. That said, I have noticed that some books call me back to cook the same recipes over and over more than others. I can already say with some confidence that I am looking forward to returning to most of the dishes I've cooked from this book, always with the question in my head as to whether they will taste as good, second-time around - or better. I already have a clear idea in my head of what I think is missing from this book and what I hope Jamie'll do more of in the next book; I feel as though this book is becoming a friend. It looks terrible, by the way. At the end of the project I'll take a picture of the book, to show its battle stains. The words 'COOK WITH JAMIE' on the cover have almost worn off; there are marks on lots of pages and my hair seems to be moulting into it. At the end of the project, if I want to make any recipe again, I might need to buy myself a new copy.

Delicious roasted white fish wrapped in smoked bacon with lemon mayonnaise and asparagus

2007-01-13T09:41:00.000-08:00

Before I decided to embark on this project, at the stage when I was flicking through the book idly wondering what I would decide to cook from it (apparently most people never make more than three recipes from any one cookbook, but I bet they imagine making more as they first skim through the book. I always do, and I don't always get round to making all those recipes that first caught my eye, for one reason or another - and I am quite an obsessive cook compared to many), this recipe was one that I knew I would definitely make, along with various pasta dishes, the chicken dishes, the pork chops, salmon fillets, and chocolate brownies. This doesn't mean that these were the recipes that stood out most or excited me most; they are simply, realistically, the ones I was most likely to make. Again it doesn't just mean that they are the easiest recipes, but they work with the most familiar and accessible ingredients and don't take too long and therefore they slot most easily into weekday dinners. This particular recipe caught my eye because I love white fish wrapped in prosciutto or pancetta, not to mention lemony mayonnaise.

It is clearly unseasonal, but forget that for now (and see my previous post); January is sluggish enough without too many foodie prohibitions being slapped on it. This recipe is a perfect weeknight dinner, particularly if like me you use decent bought mayonnaise. To make it, you season fish fillets with chopped rosemary, grated lemon zest and pepper, and wrap the fish inside flattened out slices of smoked bacon or pancetta. Fry the fish briefly then transfer to the oven (preheated to 200C) and roast for 10-12 minutes. Steam the asparagus (or boil it) and spike some mayonnaise with lemon juice and pepper; it will be a thinner texture than usual, but this makes it more of a sauce. Serve with the mayo drizzled over.

I changed the recipe slightly because where Jamie suggested 1 inch thick fish fillets, mine were pretty thin; I didn't use the oven at all and simply fried the fish wrapped in pancetta on the hob, which worked beautifully (the fish began to turn an appealingly golden shade.) The lemony mayo was delicious as usual and the fish was tasty - but then, anything wrapped in smoked bacon is likely to be. Most importantly, probably, this is the kind of dinner you can rustle up easily after work without breaking into a sweat; it is probably the perfect meal for a mid-week supper, when the weekend seems a long way off and you want to eat something nice but you don't want to be chained to the stove.

Asparagus, mint and lemon risotto

2007-01-12T11:19:00.000-08:00

Risotto seems to me to be an autumnal or wintery sort of dish. This is partly because it involves standing in front of the stove, stirring, for a reasonable length of time, which, if you're lucky enough to live somewhere warm, could be unpleasant; I don't, and in any case I am happiest when toasting myself somewhere. I have been known to come out of the garden from a bout of sunbathing and turn on the heating once inside the house. I know that this is not something to be proud of, but then if my blog was intended to make me look good, then it would probably have to change genre and become fictional. Anyway the other reason I see risotto as cold-weather food is the combination of ingredients, which end up tasting luxuriously creamy and thus somehow warming. This particular risotto shows my preconceptions to be entirely wrong - risotto is more versatile, I think, than I have typically given it credit for.

A risotto with asparagus is obviously a summer dish. I should be making it with English, local asparagus, in its pitifully short season; I broke all the rules (again) in making it this week. (In my defence, it is a particularly blustery January, and risotto is ideal comfort food - if you think about it, it's almost like baby food with alcohol and cheese - perfect) This risotto also has lemon and mint, which also evoke warmth to me, although I seem to be engaged in a love affair with lemons which has well outlasted the brief summer heatwave. To make it, you make the usual Jamie risotto base, and I did this in advance and let it cool on an oiled baking sheet as he suggests, because this method seems more convenient to me. You chop asparagus stalks into tiny discs and leave the tips whole; add these to the risotto base and add stock in the normal way (see my other risotto posts for an explanation of the Jamie technique. Turn off the heat, beat in butter and Parmesan, chopped mint, lemon zest and juice; season, rest with the lid on, and serve with a smattering of lemon zest and a drizzle of olive oil.

This risotto is a little bit different - Jamie calls it 'simple' and 'clean' and it is; it is somehow fresh and zingy and summery, although it didn't hurt suffer from being served up in the windiest January I can remember. Jamie also suggests varying it by sprinking in freshly picked crab or lobstermeat, or fresh peeled prawns - I can imagine how lovely that would be. But actually I will, probably, wait until this recipe feels more seasonal to try out the various suggested variants on the original. It may be babyfood in disguise, sort of, but that doesn't stop it from being good.

Poached salmon steak

2007-01-11T09:55:00.000-08:00

It is probably worth prefacing this post with an admission. On Monday, deadened by the return to work and toothache, I misread Jamie's book. This happens from time to time, thanks to my habit of reading cookery books while I dry my hair every morning at 7 am. At that time, I am still half asleep and only half-focused; this is considerably worse on a Monday morning, when I can't quite believe the weekend has ended so abruptly, and even more so this Monday. Anyway, cold and achey and a bit grumpy on Monday morning, I skim-read Jamie's recipe for poached salmon and picked up only the last paragraph, where Jamie offers suggestions as to what to do with your poached salmon - flake it into mashed potato with parsley to make fishcakes, into farfalle with peas and cream, blitz with creme fraiche and lemon juice to make pate, and so on. Immediately I assumed that these were the end result of the recipe and began to fantasize about fishcakes; I hugged the prospect of comforting fishcakes to me all day as I re-immersed myself in the working environment I had temporarily forgotten. When I got home and re-read the recipe, I realized that the first and clearly main suggestion is to eat the poached salmon with the vegetables it was poached with. I know that sounds obvious and I sound deranged for not even imagining it; well, guilty as charged. I could of course have abandoned the fishcake idea at that point, but I couldn't, not really; my mouth was craving fishcakes. So I give you: Jamie's poached salmon steak, with one of his suggested variations - that is, salmon fishcakes.

I did do everything Jamie said in the recipe (I am an obedient sort of person, really). I put chopped fennel, carrot, onion, celery, tomatoes, thyme, bay leaves, parsley, white wine, white wine vinegar, salt and pepper, water, and beetroot, into a large saucepan, filled it up with cold water and brought to the boil. I added the salmon and when the water was boiling again, simmered for 5 minutes on the heat before turning off the heat and letting the fish sit in the liquor for another 5 minutes for the residual heat.

I then drained the water and flaked the fish into the potatoes I had boiled and mashed, with parsley. I served with broccoli and mayo gently spiked with lemon, just because I like lemony mayonnaise.

This dinner was as comforting as I had imagined all day, the food equivalent of a hug. I should say that lots of fishcakes involve breadcrumbs or polenta crusts, or Matzo meal in Nigella's storecupboard tinned salmon fishcake recipe from Nigella Bites. The guru of comfort food, Nigel Slater, wrote somewhere that fishcakes don't need this crust, and I tend to agree; while the crust is lovely, fishcakes are delicious as they are. Everyone likes fishcakes, even people who don't like fish all that much, or so my experience tells me. I am glad I misread the recipe on Monday morning, because I couldn't have imagined anything more reassuring than the fishcakes we ate on Monday evening, while the wind raged around the roof (literally) and we returned to a normal routine.

Victoria sponge cake

2007-01-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

I used to really, really hate Victoria sponge cake when it was wheeled out at children's parties; not the sponge part, but the inevitably sickly filling (or so I saw it), which clagged up the plate and the mouth. Victoria sponge cakes couldn't be easier to make, but for some reason many people buy them, and they can taste horribly artificial; the real McCoy makes a huge difference with Victoria sponges, as with almost everything else. I have moved on from my childhood mistrust of all things sweet that weren't chocolate or ice cream and I now predictably enough really like a good sponge cake, in addition to the little buns and muffins that I have always liked. While I was making this cake, I had a sort of flash back to teenage me and thought about how shocked I would have been if someone had told me that years later I would be spending a Sunday afternoon making Victoria sponge cake. I suspect that teenage me wouldn't have liked the 31 year old me all that much, or at least all we would have had in common was books; we wouldn't have had much luck going out for dinner together (though a glass of wine would probably unite us). Whimsy aside, part of me still feels that Victoria sponge is a bit staid; when I first baked cakes they tended to be luscious, glossy chocolatey confections, courtesy of Nigella. I baked with the girl who had the room opposite mine in our university accommodation; we made each other and the rest of our house cakes for birthdays, special occasions and just for fun. Our favourite was the chocolate ganache birthday cake from Nigella's How To Eat, occasionally eclipsed by her chocolate hazelnut cake or her sour cream chocolate cake. There was a girl in the house who got on our nerves and who had the cheek to ask for a cake for her birthday, and because we were polite we made a cake, but because we were secretly mean, we made her a boring sponge with butter icing inside, and I used an evil looking green cake decorating pen to inscribe Happy Birthday on top. She was really, really touched; she didn't at all understand that we were trying to snub her, and she loved her cake, as did the other neighbours, even though it bore little resemblance to our more sophisticated cocoa-laden offerings. That taught us a lesson: not to look down our noses on the humble sponge.

I can't believe I've just admitted to doing things like that, but sadly I have a mean streak.

Anyway, back to Jamie's Victoria sponge, which I made on Sunday before returning to work on Monday. This was my last day of lazing around and - just as Freya used hers to make a superb Sachertorte, I used mine to make a sponge. I have made sponge before, obviously. I made little buns for our wedding cake(s) and decorated them with white icing and white sugar roses; I have made sponge for Eve's pudding, and so on. This is Jamie's recipe though, and for some reason on Sunday, contemplating the end of a lazy holiday, I needed something homely to make; this sprang to mind. The sponge part is standard: 225g butter/ flour/caster sugar, 4 large eggs, plus some lemon zest. I creamed the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, and folded in the flour and lemon zest, before dividing into 2 sandwich tins and baking for 20 minutes or so until lightly browned and risen. I left the cakes briefly in their tins and then turned them onto a rack to cool. Meanwhile, I warmed raspberry jam in a saucepan and stirred in raspberries (Jamie suggested strawberries, raspberries, blackberries or a mixture; he said he loves strawberries, but out of season strawberries aren't that great in my opinion); I then spread it over the top of one of the two sponges. I whipped double cream with the seeds from a vanilla pod and some sugar, and smeared that over, before topping with the other sponge.

It looks pretty, as Victoria sponges do, and it tasted fresh and lovely - completely different from the cardboard sponge and sickly fake filling of the bought versions. We had a kind of afternoon tea; I made a pot of tea and brought the milk jug into the living room (I don't really do that for just us, usually) and we ate cake and drank tea and I felt very English, all of a sudden. It was surprisingly nice. There is something about sponge, with fruit and sweetened cream, plus jam, that would make anyone feel settled and contented, particularly with a huge pot of tea and a suitably engrossing novel. Teenage Kathryn would have despised this; I now enjoy this sort of thing as a privileged part of our culinary heritage and as a simple, tasty cake that really makes an afternoon special.

Courgette fritters

2007-01-09T11:30:00.000-08:00

I've made various versions of courgette fritters before: a Nigella version from Forever Summer - which make a good veggie starter in the courgette season (ahem) - and a Delia recipe which I vaguely recall has potatoes in too. I should preface this by admitting that the word fritter doesn't do much for me: it evokes frying and grease and batter, and I really don't like batter much. (Simon heard Rick Stein say the other day that fish and chips is the best meal in the world, and repeated it somewhat triumphantly, because Simon loves fish and chips and I can't honestly see the appeal. They smell good but they are so greasy and they leave you with a horribly dry mouth. Or perhaps that's just me.) I wish someone would come up with another name for courgette fritters - courgette cakes sounds good, or courgette clusters. At any rate, I like courgette fritters a lot, despite their off-putting name, but I've never been much good at fritter-type food; I am better at cakes and curries (odd combination but it works for me). All this as something of a preamble to my take on Jamie's courgette fritters, which I made on Sunday (again. Sunday was a good day, in cooking terms) for dinner, with roast chicken and a baked butter bean dish.

Roast chicken is the ultimate in comfort food; stew is too, of course, but not in the same way. Roast chicken is, in my opinion, like the good friend you can take anywhere and who will always fit in. When I was a child, my nana used to come to stay every Tuesday; she would arrive (on the bus) while Stuart and I were at school, and when I walked through the door after school, bang on time for Sons and Daughters, that appalling Australian soap, I could smell the chicken roasting. Nana always did a roast, not always chicken, but often; the smell is incredibly evocative even now. I was a bit of a chicken obsessive when I was younger and I confess I could still probably eat chicken for every meal for quite a while before I got fed up. I go through phases of spending Sunday afternoons roasting chickens and making all the trimmings (usually in the winter), but that sort of dinner ties up the oven somewhat; roast chicken can be so much more versatile than that. I often roast a chicken to eat with other kinds of food, and if I do, I follow Jamie or Bill Granger, most often Jamie, in making a stuffing to put between skin and breast. This time, I followed Jamie in The Return of the Naked Chef, with butter, prosciutto, herbs, garlic but I added chopped apricots because I like them in stuffing, and then I roasted the chicken. I made a Tessa Kiros baked butter bean dish to go with the chicken, plus a lemon mayo, and the fritters.

The fritters sound easy but are annoying when you only want half quantities and aren't sure how to use half an egg. For 4 courgettes (and 4 people...), matchstick them and then toss them with 1 egg yolk, t tbsp plain flour, a deseeded red chilli, the chopped leaves from a bunch of mint, lemon zest and Parmesan; scrunch together. Whip the egg white with a pinch of salt until stiff and fold into the mixture. Shape into patties and fry.

This worked quite well for me, bearing in mind my innate inability to cope with fritters. They didn't burn or fall apart, which were the most likely possibilities. I could/should have cooked them a bit longer, but they tasted pretty delicious anyway, and they went very well with the chicken. Here is my plate, in case anyone is interested: roast chicken; tomatoey baked butter beans; courgette fritters.

Noone would imagine this if I told them I'd just had a roast. Funny, really. I suppose this is summer time eating, really, but it works surprisingly well in January when you've had a lot of rich food and your system wants a break (or in my case wants space to consume some chocolate or some cake). I would probably say, though, that roast chicken always hits the spot when needed; it is really the perfect food. To continue my analogy of chicken as a versatile friend, when it goes with gravy and veg, it is more middle-aged and sensibly dressed (M and S) to brave the cold air. Here it is marginally trendier - let's say Next, able to cope with a range of moods and occasions, not too old but not teeny bopper either and unfazed by the cold also. I will stop, here, before I start comparing chicken to shoes (I am capable of so doing) and return to fritters, which, I am thinking, come in a variety of forms too and can be truly delicious. Maybe Jamie is converting me.

Amazing potato and horseradish salad with fine herbs and bresaola

2007-01-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

If I sound a little odd, it's because I just did my first day's work of 2007 and, coupled with ongoing tooth infection, it has drained me completely. I had forgotten that life was about more than curling up with a novel and hitting the shops; I had also underestimated the extent to which my antibiotics are tiring me out. Moan over, but do understand if I don't quite make sense here; I am trying.

I made the most of yesterday and made no less than three dishes from Jamie's book; I am far too dopey to blog them all now, so I will start with the first I made, for lunch, partly because I wanted to use the bresaola I bought in Edinburgh the other day. Bresaola, as most people will know, is air-dried and aged salted beef fillet; supermarkets tend to sell ropey versions of it packaged up with salami and prosciutto in their delicatessen sections. I bought this in Edinburgh and had been agitating to try it; I also had some Pink Fir Apple potatoes, bought from our farm shop but originating from Carroll's Heritage potatoes which are based in the north-east, a specialist potato grower which also sells lovely Yukon Gold, Salad Blue, and so on. I like the colour and nobbliness of Pink Fir Apple, which is a waxy potato, ideal for salads; although Jamie's recipe probably implied Jersey Royals, I knew these would substitute beautifully. Fortuitously I also had some creme fraiche to use up, so this recipe was effectively a store-cupboard lunch.

To prepare the salad: scrub and boil new (or waxy) potatoes until cooked; drain and cool for 5 minutes while you get on with the rest of the salad. This means mixing lemon juice withsalt, pepper, celery, parsley and grated horseradish (um, here I cheated - didn't have any fresh horseradish to hand so used jarred horseradish sauce... oops) and mix in creme fraiche. While they are still hot, halve or quarter the potatoes and add to the bowl, toss together, taste, season if necessary.

Arrange slices of bresaola in a circle on each plate, pile the salad in the middle and then draw up the edges of the meat into the middle; sprinkle over tarragon and celery leaves, drizzle with olive oil and serve. Except that I left the meat in its retro circle because I liked how it looked - I know, sad!

This was a fantastically flavoursome lunch and definitely one to make again (Jamie suggests you can also use cold roast beef... yum). It was surprisingly delicate for such a butch-sounding salad and I will definitely make it again; it's one you could serve people staying with you too, because it is relaxed but lovely and the sort of thing most people would dive into happily. Well, we did anyway!

Like the vegetables, the salads in this book have been a revelation - brilliant recipes to keep and come back to. I would make this potato salad even without the beef - I am not very keen on potatoes swimming in mayonnaise but this horseradish cream is delicious indeed, and it does match beautifully with the potatoes and the beef, in a sort of salady remake of roast beef with horseradish sauce and roast potatoes.

Simple sauteed courgettes with chilli and lemon

2007-01-07T10:14:00.000-08:00

Since I read Hugh Fearnley-W's inspiring exhortation to eat seasonally, a couple of years ago, I have been trying to live by the rules. We used to have an organic bag of vegetables delivered to work, but the scheme folded and since then we've bought locally-grown veg at a nearby farm shop. This system means that I can support local produce and avoid unnecessary airmiles; it also means I know what I am doing when I pick up a vegetable in Tesco that is clearly out of season. I know that sounds stupid, but when I shopped exclusively in supermarkets, I didn't really know what was in season and what wasn't; I've never lived in the country; I've never even weeded a garden, so I am not exactly close to nature. Anyway now I do know, and usually I do buy seasonally as much as possible... but then this project came along and it is tempting me towards the kinds of food I would usually wait until at least May to eat. I can't imagine I will be patient enough to wait until the summer to finish my project, so I am biting the bullet and being a bit unseasonal - I know, I know, but I am acting in full awareness of my own guilt and I promise that this project apart I am usually pretty good...

Yesterday we had pork steaks to use up and some potatoes, plus pancetta and prosciutto, so I returned to the fantastic pork chop recipe from Jamie's Italy. That involves making a stuffing with dried apricots, garlic, prosciutto and sage; cutting pockets in the chops to stuff the mixture into, browning briefly on the hob then into the oven, on top of a tray of diced potatoes par boiled and tossed with pancetta matchsticks and unpeeled garlic cloves. I love this dinner - I suspect Simon does too, since he proposed to me after eating it a year ago now, although he claims that the pork chops had nothing to do with it. I still wonder if we would be married now if I'd served him spaghetti bolognaise. Anyway, to go with this delectable dish yesterday, I made sauteed courgettes with chilli and lemon, which is dead easy but was a good counterfoil to the rich pork dish. I sliced the courgettes and fried for a couple of minutes with sliced garlic and crumbled dried red chilli, seasoned, added lemon juice, and waited until the juice evaporated, when I served it.

The courgettes were really flavoursome; they contrasted very well with the stuffed pork and potatoes. Another yummy dinner, all told.

It is funny: this sort of meal is really simple, in a way, but it is delicious, too. The courgettes, which are meant to be the subject of this post, would go with all sorts of food; they are feisty and zesty, ideal companions to a whole range of flavours. Another side-dish to remember - for when courgettes come back in season, obviously....

Old-fashioned potted crab

2007-01-06T08:51:00.000-08:00

Potted crab makes me think of Enid Blyton and the Famous Five, going on picnics with lashings of ginger beer and tinned sardines, or perhaps Malory Towers and their carefully planned illicit midnight feasts, and the tuck boxes full of home-made sponge cakes that they would share with their schoolmates. (Does anyone other than me remember the unfortunately named Alma Pudden in St Clare's, who used to steal the other girls' stashes of sweet treats?) I suppose it goes without saying that I've never eaten potted crab before. In fact, I haven't eaten a lot of crab full stop, because once upon a time I was too picky and since then I haven't actually seen much crab around to buy. I like crab, though, and Jamie has several crab recipes, which have long been calling for me to try them. There is of course the exciting option of buying a live crab, killing and cooking it myself; I would need to go to the coast to find one, probably, and I didn't, yesterday - I just bought a cooked one. I was impressed by how cheap it was, until I realized that it wasn't going to yield a lot of meat. As a crab novice, I found Jamie's apparently extensive instructions needed some back-up which Simon found via a Rick Stein book (of course); by coincidence I watched Rachel Allen take the meat from a cooked crab this morning on television and discovered that we did do it right. I must admit, though, that her crab was a bigger and healthier looking specimen than mine. Anyway once we had picked the meat from the crab, separating white and brown, checking that no scary shards of shell had sneaked into the two (annoyingly small) piles of crabmeat, I potted the crab. I had never potted anything in my life and I have to admit that this is one recipe I wouldn't have tried were it not for the project, because it isn't really my sort of recipe. I am more likely to eat crab with chilli and rocket and pasta, or in Thai-style fishcakes, than potted in a little ramekin to eat with hot toast. Which is exactly why this project has honestly revolutionized how we eat: not because we were unadventurous before - I love trying new dishes -but because my adventurous cooking never really took me out of my own taste comfort zone; I might have learnt to make pastry, to bake bread, have experimented with endless curries, but I'd never have bothered potting a crab because it just wouldn't have occurred to me. Back to the method: I smashed up fennel seeds, chilli and lemon zest in the pestle and mortar and scrunched them into softened butter and the brown crabmeat, grating over nutmeg and stirring in the white crabmeat. I seasoned it, shared it between two ramekins and spooned melted butter over, topping with chopped parsley, and refrigerating.

I had already decided that potted crab was a good thing when I tasted the mixture before it went into the ramekin; when I took the ramekins out of the fridge they did look like potted crab, but somehow potted crab doesn't look appetising, particularly.
I spread the mixture on toast and couldn't believe how delicious it was - it was absolutely lovely. I will never turn up my nose at potted anything again (apart from those little jars of potted meat you see in the supermarket - and wonder who on earth buys them). Jamie suggests potting prawns instead and I am definitely going to give that a go next; this was a flavour sensation to me, and I am now a reformed potted crab sceptic (turned evangelist).

Yesterday I also made stuffed vine leaves, because I had bought a packet in brine ages ago and forgotten about them until I read the Prawn Cocktail Years and remembered them. They are a world away from the ones you buy in jars: I stuffed them with rice, tomato, minced lamb, cinnamon, toasted pine nuts, garlic and cooked them very slowly in lemon juice and water for two hours. I served them with a homemade tomato sauce.

They don't look anything special but they are really good, way better than the ones you buy - and pretty different too. Mmm.

Creamy butternut squash

2007-01-05T08:51:00.000-08:00

According to Jamie's book, butternut squash is in the top ten of vegetables bought in Britain, beating off presumably harsh competition from its rivals in the vegetable aisles (or even in the tinned section). I am surprised at its high profile, because it is not a vegetable anyone I know ate much of until a few years ago, but then it is a vegetable that surely everyone likes and it is much easier to deal with (and less stringy) than its sister, pumpkin. It seems to work cooked in all sorts of ways: roasted, mashed, in risotto, as a stuffing or sauce for pasta, in soup. If the great British public really are eating a lot of butternut squash, then they have good taste. On this subject, we saw a Tesco advert on television the other night, alerting viewers to their incredibly generous half-price offer on selected fruit and vegetables to encourage their shoppers to get their five a day. Yesterday, Simon noticed a Tesco advert in a tabloid newspaper that someone had left on the train seat, this time announcing a half price reduction on diet coke, beer, Maryland cookies and other such delicacies. So the half-price deals constitute a really convincing attempt to improve the nation's health - or not.

Tesco rant over, back to Jamie's squash dish, which begins like so many of his squash recipes (and a quick flick through his earlier books indicates he roasted squash in spices way back in his Naked Chef days...) with the squash being sliced into chunks and tossed with bashed up coriander seeds and dried chilli (only this time there is fresh thyme too). The squash is then covered in foil and cooked for 45 minutes until tender, when the foil is removed and the squash returned to the oven while a glass of Chardonnay is combined with grated Parmesan, nutmeg, and single cream; this mixture is then poured over the squash and put back in the oven for 10 minutes.

I didn't doubt that a creamy squash side dish would be good, and I was proved right. I served it with lamb chops that I had rubbed in the spicy Cajun marinade Jamie suggests in his second book - for anyone who hasn't spotted the double page of marinades and rubs in that book, they are brilliant for jazzing up pork or lamb chops - and it was a nice combo. I also made celeriac mash but in retrospect that was too much, really; it was just that a celeriac getting onto its last legs was looking reproachfully at me and I do like celeriac a lot, despite its profoundly ugly exterior.

We ate this dinner on Wednesday evening, not last night - last night we had the pickings from our trip to Edinburgh to feast on. We nearly didn't - I booked the trains on Wednesday on impulse, seeing a cheap deal on single tickets, and misremembered the time of the train from Newcastle. As we sat on the Metro in what we thought was plenty of time to get to the station and collect our tickets, mooch around WHSmith, get a coffee and some cash, and then get on the train, I checked the train time and realized it left twenty minutes earlier than I had remembered. Oops. Luckily, the fact that we are always desperately early for trains meant that we (just) had enough time to pick up the tickets from the Fast Ticket machine, get cash and leap on the train, which was delightfully quiet. I am not going to turn into Victor Meldrew on this blog, but a brief question: why is it that the trainline.com offered me a choice of facing direction of travel or not, and I chose to face on both journeys, only to find when we got on the train that we were going backwards? Anyway ranting aside, Edinburgh was lovely: very clear blue skies, cold in a nice sort of way, and we went to Valvona and Crolla. I probably don't need to introduce it but I will anyway: it is the oldest delicatessen in Scotland, was founded in 1934 by Italian immigrants, and has gone from strength to strength ever since, attracting the attention of many a famous foodie. According to Nigel Slater in the Observer, 'Valvona & Crolla in Edinburgh is everything I want a food shop to be. Sometimes I wish the Continis would let me move in.' I wouldn't mind moving next door, frankly, either. The delicatessen is amazing, small but high-ceilinged with shelves right up to the ceiling packed with the kind of food you want to buy. There are loads of types of pasta and rice, sauces, olive oils, vinegars, plus a fantastic meat counter, cheese counter, lots of fresh breads, and wines. Plus a cafe/bar at the back of the shop - called the Caffe Bar - which is light and airy and very unpretentious, but has a great fixed menu and specials. We shared a selection of breads and a plate of air-dried bresaola with rocket, Parmesan and lemon to start, then Simon had orechiette with spicy sausage and greens, and I had ravioli stuffed with pumpkin and served with walnut pesto; it was all delicious. We also had a really smooth Italian Merlot and espressos to wake us up and send us back into the street. It was absolutely lovely and not particularly expensive and I would love to be able to pop in there on a regular basis; equally I would love to have that deli locally, or even just a bit closer than a 90 minute train journey away. In the shop, we bought: parma ham; speck; smoked pancetta; more parma ham, in the form of a knuckle; salame; bresaola; a Fonteluna sausage; baby Stilton; brie de Meaux; parmesan (of course); extra virgin olive oil; sourdough bread; some espresso cups; some of the Merlot we had with lunch, and a book for me. We staggered back onto the train with all our wares after another look round the shops (somewhat weighed down by our purchases...) and tucked into some of them last night, and they were really good. The salame surprised me most: I like salame but have never had particularly good salame (whereas I have with parma ham...) and this was divine. Mmm. Foodie heaven, as I said to Simon on the way home; I feel a renewed enthusiasm for Italian antipasti fuelled by our lunch today, when we had some more. On the other hand it is probably a good thing that I don't live next door to that sort of place, or I wouldn't be able to stop buying and eating it, and it isn't all that cheap...

Crunchy raw beetroot salad with feta and pear

2007-01-04T12:41:00.000-08:00

I have only begun cooking with beets in the last couple of years - I suspect that my previous lack of enthusiasm was caused by my dad's penchant (or passion, even) for jarred beetroot in vinegar and in truth I only really embraced the beetroot as vegetable when, just over a year ago, we used to get an organic vegetable bag delivered every 2 weeks. The scheme folded and we now go to a local farm shop for meat and veg, but at the time they kept putting beetroot in the bag and I was forced to learn how to cook it. I tried Nigella's beetroot puree, which is surprisingly good; I tried boiling it and roasting it, but I never tried eating it raw in salad until yesterday, when I came upon Jamie's beetroot salad with feta and pear and found it inexplicably beautiful, and therefore decided to try it. After all, beetroot is beginning to be cited almost as often as blueberries and broccoli as a superfood (have you noticed that superfoods tend to begin with B, whereas the stuff we aren't meant to eat - chips and cookies and chocolate - tend to begin with C?) and it is certainly cheap, and locally grown, and it is a very -ahem - lurid colour. So, yesterday I made this salad for lunch, since we are off work this week, which changes everything in terms of what we can eat.

To prepare the salad, scrub and peel 4 beetroot (for 4 people) then slice it into matchsticks (see my earlier posts on my lamentable knife skills, but I find matchsticking vegetables oddly relaxing); peel, core and matchstick some pears (3, for 4 people). Toss these all together, season, then toss in lemon oil dressing (lemon juice and oil in a 1:3 ratio), test, add more lemon if you want, then divide the salad between plates, crumble over some feta cheese and sprinkle over baby mint leaves and, if desired, some sunflower seeds.

This is a simple and surprisingly nice-tasting salad (as you can see from the pic, I forgot the mint leaves until after the photo had been taken). It is somehow light and filling all at once - I suppose the lemony oil and the pear make it seem refreshing, whilst the earthier beetroot and the feta seem pretty substantial. We had this with bread and it made a lovely and quite different lunch.

Today, meanwhile, we have been to Edinburgh for the day and I paid a visit to a foodie heaven: Valvona and Crolla, about which more, tomorrow. For now, it is perhaps enough to say that for anyone thinking of making this salad, beware: the beetroot bled its purpley pink hues into my palms yesterday in a sinister way, so that I went out looking as though I had blood on my hands, if blood were pinky-purple, in any case. I felt like a criminal as I wandered around Tesco replenishing my baking stock (I had run out of plain flour, self-raising, vanilla extract, etc, and I get antsy when I don't have the wherewithall to whip up a tasty baked goodie at a moment's notice) and trying to keep my hands covered up. If you don't mind pink hands, I can heartily recommend crunchy raw beetroot salad with feta and pear - healthy,refreshing, filling, lurid - what more can you ask?

Pan-roasted bream with a quick crispy fennel salad

2007-01-03T09:50:00.000-08:00

Fennel again. Good thing I'm not a fennel-hater, since Jamie seems to use a lot in this book; he doesn't seem to know about the fennel-hating brigade (people who don't like fennel tend to be as zealous in their vitriol for fennel as the Brussel-sprout hating lot are for innocent sprouts). I wonder if people shelve their picky dislikes when Jamie cooks for them, or if he just knows more adventurous people than I do. Anyway I happen to like fennel - a lot. I particularly like that salami and fennel pasta from Happy Days with the Naked Chef, but I suspect that salami might be another risky ingredient for some of my occasional dinner guests. The decision to make this dish yesterday was spontaneous when I went to the fishmonger (yes! I went to the fishmonger. I am off work this week and so I can do things like go to the fishmonger, which is ridiculously exciting for me. Other people take time off work and go skiing or lie on a beach in Tenerife, whilst I loll around reading crime novels and dreaming about food, and going to the fishmonger) and saw some lovely sea bream which I had filleted. I didn't ask the guy to scale the fish, which was a mistake because then the sous-chef was charged with scaling it and scales rained gently across the kitchen. Surely the nice fishmonger could have guessed we didn't want the scales? Oh well, my fault for not asking.

Scaling apart, the dish was another nice and easy one. I shaved a fennel bulb (tops reserved) with a speed peeler and put it in a bowl of iced water for 10 minutes to crisp up. Meanwhile, Simon scored the skin of the fish (this time he found a sharper knife and the task was rendered 100 times easier) and I sprinked the fish with salt, pepper and bashed up fennel seeds and dried chilli. I fried the fish on both sides on a medium heat; while the fish was cooking, I drained the fennel, mixed it with the reserved fennel tops and marjoram leaves and dressed it with lemon juice and olive oil, then chopped sun-dried tomatoes and light seasoning. I plated the fish and piled the salad on top.

We ate this with crusty bread and good white wine. It was a lovely dinner, absolutely bursting with flavour - fast food (faster if the fillets are scaled for you!) but bearing little resemblance to the usual fare that comes into that category. Another keeper...

The best stew with potato and rocket pasta cushions

2007-01-02T09:10:00.000-08:00

After I finished reading 'Julie and Julia' and realized that cooking with Jamie is a walk in the park compared with cooking with Julia, I began telling Simon about how Julie and her husband often didn't eat till midnight and never before 9, in an attempt to keep him on side with my project. He clearly suspected that I was telling him this in order to pave the way for some late-night dinners, since he responded by checking, 'you aren't going to make me eat at midnight, are you?' One of the best things about the Jamie project is that we haven't (yet) had any midnight feasts masquerading as dinner; another is that although we have ventured into the world of cooking squid, mussels and scallops (with crab and lobster to come), there haven't been bone marrow dishes or sweetbreads, and, best of all, there have been loads of ordinary dinners, the kind normal people, if they exist, might actually want to eat. Like the stew I made yesterday to go with potato pasta cushions, which is really just a variant on stew and mash, only here the mash is mixed with lemon and nutmeg and parmesan and rocket and stuffed inside freshly made pasta. I thought this was a happy, comforting way to start 2007; not as easy as all that, because you have to make the pasta, but not too difficult, all told.

First I made the stew, which doesn't really need describing because everyone knows how to make a decent basic stew (it had thyme and rosemary in, and white wine; otherwise all the usual suspects).

Next, Simon and I did our usual joint effort on the pasta - the initial rolling seems to require four hands, or three at least. I made the filling by baking potatoes for an hour in a medium-hot oven, letting them cool and then mashing the flesh with grated parmesan, lemon juice and zest, chopped rocket and grated nutmeg. We cut the pasta into 10 cm squares and filled each square by hand, sealing and cutting into a vaguely neat shape. These shapes look a bit like pillows or cushions; they are ravioli, in effect, only bigger than usual.

We served the stew with the cooked pasta cushions on top, drizzled with a little olive oil and fresh parsley.

This is rustic food, not the kind of showpiece that people tend to serve at dinner parties - which is a shame, because I defy anyone not to love it. The stew is as tasty as a good stew should be and the pasta cushions are delicious - the potato is given fantastic flavour by the lemon, nutmeg, cheese and rocket; their lemony sharpness contrasts beautifully with the homey, hearty stew. Another heartwarming dinner; another recipe to come back to (and I have happily already frozen extra portions for a rainy day).

Fifteen Christmas Salad, Perfectly Cooked Crispy Duck, Asian style

2007-01-01T04:06:00.000-08:00

It is now 2007, the beginning of a new year and as usual I haven't made any resolutions; if I had, I wouldn't tell anyone them anyway, because I would be bound to break them. Last night we had a quiet meal at home, our first New Year's Eve with just us, in the house, and for the first time I was able to cook on New Year's Eve. I took my culinary responsibility seriously, mainly because I had to get the food right or I would be asleep by 10 pm - I am not very good at staying up late and I hate feeling stuffed like a force-fed French goose. I always knew that the starter would be Jamie's Fifteen Christmas salad, but I didn't decide on the main until I saw a nice-looking organic duck; dessert I only planned yesterday.

The starter, first: Jamie calls it his favourite salad ever and suggests serving it in December when clementines are at their best. This little salad has some lovely ingredients: buffalo mozzarella; fridge-cold clementines; rocket; treviso; speck (smoked prosciutto); lemon oil and zest, mint, and balsamic. My version was a tad different because I couldn't find treviso or radicchio whole anywhere, so I used rocket with a little bit of cos lettuce to boost it a bit (I know it's not the same, but it's what I had). To make it, I tore a ball of mozzarella per person over each small serving plate, seasoned and scattered with lemon zest. I sliced the clementines into thick discs and arranged them over the cheese (again, one per person). Then I tossed the salad leaves and most of the mint with lemon oil and wrapped these in speck to make a bundle for each of us, adding that little package to the plate. Finally I shaved over some Parmesan, added mint leaves and drizzled over the quality balsamic vinegar that Simon bought for me last month.

I can see why this salad would be Jamie's favourite. It immediately became mine, too -it is absolutely divine. The flavours work together magically and every mouthful is an intense pleasure. Jamie suggests making this at other times of the year too, with blood oranges, peaches, pears or figs; I will have to, because I will have to eat this salad again. As starters and salads go, it is perfect: refreshing, sweet, bitter, salty, creamy and peppery.

The Christmas salad was a tough act to follow. I returned to Jamie's perfectly cooked crispy duck recipe, which has an alternative cooking suggestion: instead of rubbing it in sage salt, he suggests giving it an Asian vibe and rubbing it in five spice and shoving ginger, rather than sage leaves, in the cavity. I decided to go with that vibe and take it further, serving the duck with Chinese pancakes and matchsticks of carrot, spring onion, cucumber and coriander (and hoisin sauce). I did this because I figured it would be less filling than a traditional main (this sort of Chinese crispy duck is usually eaten as a starter) and would leave space for dessert. I was right, except that this sort of food is incredibly moreish and you have to stop yourself from picking up just another pancake. This course nearly went wrong because Tesco have apparently stopped selling the little Chinese pancakes (yes I know you can make them, and no, I wasn't about to try) so we had to go into town to the little Asian supermarket, which, thankfully, if unsurprisingly, did. It didn't go wrong, and involved no last-minute cooking; Simon shredded the duck and I chopped the vegetables, and then we ate it.

It was as yummy as Chinese duck and pancakes always are; I don't really need to say any more, except that there is lots left for lunch today (hurrah) and I am looking forward to it already.

For dessert, I made a chocolate and ginger cake from the Green and Black's cookbook. It was basically a simple cake mixture (eggs, sugar, flour, butter) plus some cocoa powder, chopped stem ginger and stem ginger syrup, baked, then topped with chocolate and chopped crystallized ginger. Except I cheated and used Green and Black's ginger chocolate, which has pieces of crystallized ginger in anyway.

You can see the spikes of ginger in the icing, which really gave it a kick. This is a lovely cake: light and vibrant, it would be as good for afternoon tea as it would for dessert, and it is delightfully simple. Below I've added an extra pic to show off my new cake stand, which my parents bought me for Christmas - it looks white but is pale blue, another Nigella Living Kitchen accessory. I love it and am shamelessly parading it now on its first outing.

So: a new year has begun, swept in quite literally here by terrifying gusts of wind that blew down our hanging baskets and threw a learner plate into our back garden. Happy new year, to anyone who has overcome a hangover in time to read me; may it bring health, contentment, and many more Jamie recipes like the duck and the divine salad!

Grandad Ken's crispy grilled trout with parsley and lemon

2006-12-31T08:41:00.000-08:00

It is New Year's Eve - the end of another calendar year, which as usual means little to me because I've always lived by the academic year rather than the calendar year, so that the year seems to end in July rather than December. Last year we spent a few days over the New Year period with my parents-in-law in Devon and saw the new year in with champagne and a trio of fish that apparently constitute Prince Charles's breakfast; what I remember most is that on New Year's morning, foggy from the late night and still tasting mackerel, I was absorbed in a gripping thriller and found it almost impossible to wrench myself away and make polite conversation. Memo to self: do not go to visit relatives with a good book - always take a boring, worthy tome that will a) make me look erudite and b) not distract me from the duty of socializing. Ulysses is clearly next time's book of choice, since I have never managed to get past page one. This year, though, we are at home over the New Year period and I have a reassuring stack of novels to usher me into 2007, not to mention the pile of cookbooks I've already mentioned.

A hideous cliche, but New Year's Eve is a time to remember as well as to anticipate and it is only too fitting that I should find myself blogging this particular dish (which we ate yesterday) at this moment in time. Jamie calls it Granddad Ken's crispy grilled trout with parsley and lemon and affectionately recalls going fishing with his granddad as a small child. I associate whole fish with my grandma, who died a few years ago and who was an inspiration in many ways. Grandma had eclectic tastes; she liked Chinese takeaway and lasagne as well as roast dinners and fish. When my brother and I were little, we used to go on holiday to France every summer with our parents and grandparents; after my grandpa died when I was nine, Grandma kept coming, even when confined to a wheelchair, and even though she couldn't speak French. For reasons I can't recall, my parents always seemed to befriend people who went fishing and would bring live fish to our caravan for our dinner. Stuart and I naturally behaved the way two picky English children would when faced with live fish as a prospect for dinner: we squeaked and squawked and refused to go near it, and exclaimed in disgust when the others tried to. Grandma was the only one who wasn't honestly freaked out by the fish and so she was in charge of gutting them and preparing them to be eaten, which she did stoically, ignoring the high-pitched protests coming from the direction of my brother and me and the more muted but equally intense revulsion coming from my parents, who didn't really want the fish either. Once, my parents put a fish back in the water; we never knew if it survived. I tell all this because whole fish still makes me think of Grandma, who, before she died, suffered a lot of pain and never, ever complained; the stoic expression she wore as she gutted fish was emblematic of her attitude to life. It wasn't just that she never complained: she was a naturally optimistic and happy person who saw the best in everything, not in an infuriating Pollyanna way, but in a funny way. I wish she was still here and I could have given her some of Granddad Ken's crispy grilled trout: my parents wouldn't thank you for it, but Grandma would have loved seeing me eat it.

Anyway, back to Jamie's recipe: first, you slash each trout about ten times on each side with a sharp knife, which should be simple but in fact wasn't, for me. My knife skills are on a par with those of a clumsy ten year old; either that or we have blunt knives, which seemed to be confirmed by the fact that the sous-chef also struggled when drafted in to help. That done, I rubbed the fish in olive oil, seasoned them, and stuffed them with chopped parsley and lemon slices, before placing them on a baking tray and scattering lemon zest over. I halved another lemon and put the two halves on the baking tray, dabbed the fish with butter, and then grilled, 6 minutes each side, until crispy and golden.

It was okay. I don't hate whole fish anymore, in fact I'd love a nice seabass, but I remain unconvinced by the merits of trout, which seems to me to be a pretty boring fish. The lemon and parsley gave it a good flavour, but it just didn't blow me away. I suppose it is a decent midweek meal, a nice midweek meal even, but nothing special. I ate it with Jamie's simple crunchy side salad which was, however, absolutely fantastic. It doesn't need its own post, I don't think: it is just torn little gem and cos lettuce, with thinly sliced carrot and cucumber, celery heart, and a handful of blanched fine green beans, plus flat leaf parsley and a choice of dressing (balsamic, lemon or creamy French). I went for balsamic, which is simply balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil in a ratio of 1:3. It was delicious.

Finally, I was given a silicone loaf tin for Christmas, cunningly in the same pale blue as all my Nigella Living Kitchen accessories, and I made Bill Granger's coconut bread for breakfast today. It was very good and incredibly easy for something so lovely - you slice and toast it with icing sugar drizzled over, and slices will freeze easily too - definitely worth a try.

Anyway the Old Year is drawing to a close, and I need to get on with preparing dinner (and my last 'Jamie project' recipe for 2006!). I'll be back next year.

Stained-glass butternut squash lasagne

2006-12-30T00:18:00.000-08:00

Before I start recounting this dish, I promised - or threatened, depending on one's viewpoint - to write a bit about what I've been reading. In real life I have much less time to read for pleasure but it has never stopped me - reading is a way of life and not a hobby for me. The festive period is giving me lots of reading time and I have happily accumulated a pile of books, novels and food-themed books of various kinds, to gorge on during my holiday from work.

The biggest of these books by far is the Larousse Gastronomique, which is - literally - an enormous and weighty tome and lends to me - I think - some culinary gravitas as a foodie. My brother and sister-in-law gave it to me for Christmas and it is tremendously useful for me because I'm not a proper foodie: that is, there are lots of things I don't know and there are lots of things I haven't tried and need to learn. I haven't, for example: killed a crab or lobster/made meringues or pavlova (I know how sad that sounds)/made Christmas pudding/made any pudding that involved muslin and waterbaths, though I have managed cheesecakes in waterbaths/gutted a fish. There will be more to add to the list, but I can't quite remember what right now. The Larousse is thus going to be an indispensable kitchen companion that will allow me to bluff my way through the kind of recipes that assume a cook more steeped in innate culinary knowhow than me; it is also long enough to ensure that even I won't try to read it from cover to cover.

Other cookbooks look gauche and immature next to the Larousse, but I have stockpiled some anyway, mainly through a combination of Amazon offers and the Borders post-Christmas sale. Before Christmas I bought myself Simon Hopkinson and Lindsay Bareham, The Prawn Cocktail Years, which is a witty account of favourite British restaurant dishes from the fifties, sixties and seventies. I wasn't born until the seventies, but still I recall many of the dishes evoked with a smidgeon of nostalgia because in my world they were still circulating in the eighties (at which point trendy Britain had moved on to other kinds of embarrassing foodie fashion): I remember prawn cocktail, coq au vin, beef bourgignon, peach melba, and so on. Actually I still eat prawn cocktail and I wouldn't honestly object to coq au vin or steak garni, though I recoil at the thought of chicken kiev or duck a l'orange (I didn't like that first time round, even). Anyway The Prawn Cocktail Years is fascinating, funny and the fact that it gives recipes for all these dishes we remember and purport to despise serves to remind us of the inexorable pull our food memories have on what we really want to eat (as opposed to what we think we should want to eat). As an aside, I bought Simon Hopkinson's Roast Chicken and Other Stories in Oxfam yesterday for almost nothing; I have yet to take it from the bag so will report later.

Before Christmas I also bought Sophie Conran's Pies, mainly because I saw a delicious-looking photo of a Spanish chicken pie from that book but also because I was seduced by the pink cover (I know...) and the incredible Amazon price. In the Borders sale I bought Angela Boggiano's Pie, again attracted by the (wittier) cover and because this book had more to read, about the history and traditions of different sorts of pie. It was only once I realized that I had acquired two new pie books that it struck me that I hardly ever want to eat pie. That notwithstanding, both of these books are fun to flick through and imagine making pies; I am determined to set to making one sometime soon.

In the Borders sale I also snapped up Skye Gyngell's A Year in My Kitchen, which is a beautiful book, written by the Australian-born but now UK-dwelling Vogue food writer. I own a few Australian cookbooks and I like their breezy, relaxed, often Asian-influenced food, but they seem to work better here in the summer than in the winter, when their recipes seem too light to hit the spot. A Year in my Kitchen is based on the seasons and the recipes all look incredibly delicious, stylish, and best of all, easy - none of that pretentious food styling where you arrange slices of food in precarious towers in the middle of a huge white plate and call it food art. Is it me or does that kind of food not really call out for you to eat it? Skye's does, though, which raises it a notch.

Finally in the Borders sale I bought Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook; I love his style, because he can write as powerfully as (I presume) he can cook, and his book definitely makes me hungry, for steak and chips and proper rustic hearty fare. Mmm. This is a book to read but also to cook from; it appeals to the belly as to the mind.

I did receive two other foodie books for Christmas: one is Jeffrey Steingarten, It Must've Been Something I Ate, which I have dipped into - he writes well too, and very wittily, and the chapter on salt that I have read should be required reading for the Food Police - and the other is Julia and Julie, Julie Powell's tale of her project to cook her way through the 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year. I read this in one go on Boxing Day, shamelessly gorging myself on it (I do that with books, more than with food) and I found it intensely powerful, not because Julie set herself the mad task of 524 recipes in 365 days, but because she writes so honestly about herself and her life and how the project affected her. In truth, the project seemed to take over her life and sometimes it literally appeared to drive her crazy; I caught myself thinking that her husband must be a saint, not least because they never ate before 9 pm and often nearer midnight. I couldn't do what she did: all that French food would definitely leave me feeling like a stuffed goose myself, for one thing, and then there are the complicated techniques that took her and would take me a while to get to grips with. Jamie's book is far more accessible; we always eat before 9 pm; it isn't full of butter and cream; I haven't set a time limit. Nonetheless, I understand why Julie gets so frustrated when things don't work out - so do I, albeit at a lower level. My madness when the one-egg mayonnaise failed led me to cut my thumb on the Magimix was only rivalled by Tesco selling me the second off butternut squash in a row this week - did you know squash went off? I have always found them spookily long-lasting, but clearly not, or else I am the only one buying Tesco organic squash. What I am saying is that the Jamie project isn't all Happy Families either - and Simon is threatening to tell some of the stories from the Other Side, that is, the side of the husband who sees my wild-eyed frustration in the supermarket when they don't have the ingredients I need, or who calls impatiently on the sous-chef because I am too weak or the knife is too blunt to effect the perfect incision into a piece of fish or meat. It isn't as bad as Julie and Julia, though; I can't sustain that level of drama, and this book is way more reassuringly on my side, or so it feels.

Anyway the second squash to turn out to be off two hours after purchase was for dinner on Thursday evening, and we had to buy another in M and S. This was for stained glass lasagne with butternut squash, which is an interesting dish and not comparable to any pasta dish I've made before - I suppose it is an open lasagne, but with a twist. To make it, we made pasta as usual (we have recently been using OO flour where before we had O pasta flour, and it makes a world of difference) and after turning it into sheets in the machine, scattered herbs (parsley, sage and fennel tops) over one half, folded it up and rolled it back through the machine. You can see the herbs inside the pasta sheet so it looks like a stained glass window, sort of, hence the title. Meanwhile I had roasted the squash with bashed up fennel seeds, dried chilli and coriander seeds and then mashed it up to make baby food. I cooked the pasta and tossed it in butter and Parmesan. To serve, I smeared a layer of squash, a layer of pasta, another layer of squash, a top layer of pasta, plus a scattering of chopped fresh red chilli and then Parmesan for the table.

I loved the squash here, really flavoursome, and I liked the pasta but it felt like a lot of pasta. This may just have been because I was a bit overfed from Christmas or I might have been stingy with the butter that I tossed the pasta in and so it went down less quickly than usual (which inevitably means that despite using warmed plates, the pasta began to cool down a bit). I love the idea, though, and the combination of flavours went really well. Next time I would use less pasta - there will be a next time, because it was a fun dish to create and assemble and it tasted good, an antidote to the meaty Christmas fare we'd had hitherto, as the Jamie project began again.

The best roast turkey

2006-12-28T11:21:00.000-08:00

The first post after Christmas is proving difficult to write - or, more honestly, I have been lacking the impetus to write it, feeling over-sated with food and wine and conversation, and just wanting to loll around reading, which is anyhow what I do best. I took a mini-break from my project over Christmas mainly because Christmas cooking is steeped in traditions, both familial and (inter)national, that the wannabe foodie messes with at her peril. More than that, Christmas foods seem to be designed to stuff you so full that you don't ever feel hungry, or not really, and you certainly don't crave more food, which makes me wonder how these edible traditions came about and how they have lingered for so long. It would seem, for example, that tradition dictates a starter before roast turkey and Christmas pudding - but how many people ever make it to the pudding stage? Our family habits involve no starter, a roast turkey dinner with all the trimmings, including Yorkshire puddings, because my nana is from Yorkshire and expects it, and then a dessert, be it Christmas pudding or cake, ice cream, or, on occasions in the past, a half-coated chocolate digestive biscuit for me, which in the Picky Years was my all-time favourite dessert. I am not sure anyone really wants dessert after roast turkey with its trimmings; I don't, but I did have one this year - part of the (Nigella) buche de Noel that I made and forgot to take a picture of until it had been eaten down to a Yule stump. Our Christmas was muddled for reasons too complicated to explain here, so we had Christmas dinner (turkey...) on Christmas Eve, and then beef on Christmas Day: the roast rib of beef with beetroot from Jamie's book, that I have made and blogged before. My dad hates any form of roast dinner, eats it under duress and sometimes, often, even, slathers it with vinegar rather than gravy, but he loves beetroot and cauliflower cheese and the roast rib of beef with beets and cauliflower cheese won him over on Christmas Day. Another Jamie result. Before I get onto Christmas dinner, other culinary anecdotes from the holiday weekend: we made tapas for Saturday evening, including yummy patatas a lo pobre and my mother's fantastic tortilla; my sister-in-law made a yummy chocolate and cranberry roulade. The kitchen was almost permanently occupied by one person or another and by my brother's dog, who was lured in by the attractive smells and scored a few illicit treats as a result.

The major meal was, of course, the roast turkey dinner. I seized the chance to try Jamie's roast turkey recipe from Cook with Jamie, because we don't have a particular family tradition for turkey-cooking - last year I followed Jamie too, but a different recipe - and because although Jamie suggests that you can eat this at any time of year, I don't know many people who roast huge turkeys in July. To prepare the turkey, I boiled the giblets to make the gravy; meanwhile, I made Jamie's stuffing by throwing pancetta strips, sage leaves and butter into a hot pan, adding chopped garlic cloves, celery and onion and cooking until golden brown. I then removed the pan from the heat, added breadcrumbs and chopped apricots and, once cool, added minced pork, lemon zest, nutmeg, egg and seasoning.

I sliced more strips of pancetta in half and wrapped each around a rosemary sprig and a garlic sliver. Except I missed the garlic out this time because my nana finds garlic difficult to digest. I rolled each strip up and my brother made slits in the turkey's thighs and drumsticks into which I inserted these little rolls. The point of this is to give the legs flavour and keep them moist.

At this point I felt as though I was getting too close to the turkey for comfort. We had -well, my sister-in-law did, and it stuck - named the turkey and it began to feel uncomfortably human as I massaged stuffing under the skin and spread it carefully, and then plonked an orange that had briefly been microwaved into its cavity, before rubbing it with oil, seasoning it and placing it in the hot oven. It is strange how knowing that you have bought a turkey which had a nice life somehow makes you more aware that it was once alive than buying a cardboardy supermarket one does; that is probably a good thing.

Here is our turkey before:

And after:

I don't really need to say that the turkey was delicious - even cardboard turkey would taste good smothered in gravy. And this gravy was pretty good because it came from the giblets and from the water my mother used for her yummy sausage and sage stuffing. I have, however, been eating this turkey on and off ever since (with salad; with cranberry sauce in a sandwich; with bacon for a variant on a club sandwich, and in curry) and I can therefore confidently say that the turkey was moist and delicious, frankly. It looks a tad burnt in the above pic; that is just where the stuffing was thickest under the skin. This stuffing was amazing - I used what was left over to make little stuffing balls and they were all quickly eaten up. I will use this again when we next have roast chicken, because you can taste the apricot and lemon and it works really well, somehow. And who knows - maybe I'll try a turkey again before next Christmas? Then again, we've been eating leftovers for days and I've kind of had my fill of turkey now, so probably not.

Christmas food may be very much the same thing every year but that in itself is comforting, warming, part of the whole return-t0-childhood that marks this time of year. I am happy to say that leftovers are now finished and we can turn back to the Jamie project with renewed vigour, even if it does get in the way of reading my new books.... about which more, shortly...

Happy Christmas!

2006-12-23T00:08:00.000-08:00

It seems that Christmas is upon us - for such a long time I felt it was too early to think about and then suddenly it was almost too late. Not quite, luckily. I will be having a mini blogging break because we are going away today, to my parents, for a few days. Cooking-wise, I will be cooking the turkey from the recipe in Cook with Jamie and will also make again the roast rib of beef with beets; I got up unseasonably early this morning to make shortbread from the book for my grandmother. Otherwise I will resume working through the book after the festivities. It all feels a bit manic today, so obviously I am procrastinating by blogging instead of working my way through the impressive list of tasks I have assigned to myself, not least of which is finishing wrapping presents (is it just me or is wrapping highly tedious, after the first couple of parcels?).

Yesterday, I marzipanned and iced the Christmas cake, which looks quite cute (I added one Christmas tree and lots of holly leaves made of leftover scraps of white icing) - I hope it tastes okay. Usually I make a cake that lies somewhere between Nigella's from How to Be a Domestic Goddess and my nana's old recipe, but this time I was seduced by Nigella's Christmas Kitchen and made the cake from the show. My nana will definitely tell me if it isn't any good, so I will find out soon enough.

My brother and sister-in-law and their dog are coming north today; we have family over at my parents' later for tapas; Christmas is here. Oh, and yesterday we went to an out-of-town Borders, which has Starbucks in it - and Simon found some gingerbread syrup (the syrup he ordered is somewhere in the post, but don't get me back on my high horse again...). So last night we had some of what Nigella calls Christmas in a glass - gingerbread syrup and prosecco. It really honestly does taste like Christmas in a glass - it is delicious. Thank you again, Nigella; I'm looking forward to more liquid Christmas later.

For now, though, the farm shop awaits us for the turkey and beef and for some vegetables. When we get back I have to wrap the edible goodies, pack and go. Happy Christmas to anyone still reading me (Christmas is too busy for blogs..!) and I will be back before the New Year, probably via the sales (I never said I was one of those pure, walk-in-the-country types, who celebrates Christmas as a chance to avoid the shops). Merry Christmas!

Spinach and goat's cheese risotto

2006-12-21T23:22:00.000-08:00

Risotto is the ideal food for toothache, not only because its oozy texture makes it easy to eat, but also because it is bowl-food, comfort food like soup or mashed potato, that warms you up from the inside. It is the kind of food you can eat when you are too tired to bother and when your mouth has been aching for days. I should say at this point that my mouth is much better; the ache hasn't gone completely but it has waned considerably and I feel much more human. This is helped by the fact that I have stopped work for at least 10 days, which has probably kicked my spirits up a few notches and filled me with an extra surge of festive cheer. The gingerbread syrup hasn't arrived by the way - the company Simon used seems to have a particularly unhelpful notion of customer service. When an email is sent informing you that your order has dispatched, you assume it has, well, dispatched, but in the crazy world of British customer service, it could mean anything at all, really. Simon rang to complain and a zombified voice informed him that he couldn't be sure when it dispatched, except that it certainly wasn't on the date that the email had been sent to tell us that it had. Anyway we bought some creme de peche as a substitute and had some with sparkling Pinot Grigio last night, and I can hardly believe that gingerbread syrup could be as good (although I am still furious that we pay for the kind of service that we so frequently get).

Another bete noire of mine is the Royal Mail. I know they are incredibly busy at this time of year but why can't they plan ahead and employ temps? Students on holiday from university need something to pay their drinks bills, after all, although I appreciate that the early mornings might cramp their style. It isn't just the erratic service (some parcels arrive spookily quickly, others outrageously slowly) but also the bizarre behaviour of my postman that makes me turn into Victor Meldrew. Just now, I was talking on-line to my brother (who is at work, poor soul), sat at the computer in my pyjamas, and the doorbell rang. I ran downstairs as fast as I can at 8 am and opened the door, by which time the postman had fled. Again. He saw me and came back with an air of resigned grumpiness. I am convinced that he knocks and runs, in the manner of a small child playing a trick; he seems to move with lightning speed. In any case, he delivered a lovely box from the US, which is exciting - and which arrived pretty fast, having been posted on 12th December. 10 days seems really fast from the States, as opposed to 10 days for a package I just received from another part of England. I will stop ranting, though, because I am on holiday and therefore not allowed to complain.

Spinach and goat's cheese risotto.... I made the usual risotto base and then wilted the spinach in melted butter, garlic and nutmeg, before chopping it very finely and stirring it into the risotto with Parmesan, butter and a squeeze of lemon. I rested the risotto with a lid on briefly, folded in some goat's cheese, sprinkled with lemon zest and more crumbled goats cheese and drizzled with extra virgin olive oil, and served.

In the book, this risotto is entirely green, rather than lightly shaded and flecked, like mine. I have no idea where I went wrong, but the flecked effect is quite pretty anyway, and it certainly didn't hurt the flavour. I love goat's cheese, but I am aware that it is not a taste universally shared (like fennel...); for people who do like goat's cheese, this is a tasty risotto which is incredibly easy to eat, even for a person with toothache.

Braised peas with spring onions and lettuce

2006-12-20T13:31:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was definitely not a day filled with festive cheer - for me, at any rate. I had a dental appointment that managed to last 2 hours, as the dentist filled a hideously deep crack in my tooth; it involved several injections and a lot of imagination to get past it. After the swelling came down, the pain kicked in and I have been battling with toothache ever since. I had forgotten how debilitating toothache is: it literally wore me down, so I just wanted to curl up in bed and lock out the world. I skipped lunch and by dinner time I was as hungry as I was achey, but couldn't face much, so I made fishcakes with mashed potato, flaked poached haddock, chopped parsley and cayenne, and I also made Jamie's braised peas with spring onion and lettuce. Oh and I felt sorry for myself - I suppose that goes without saying.

These peas are a variant of a classic French dish, which I have eaten quite a lot in the form of the French jarred peas you can buy over here (they are extraordinarily expensive in Tesco). I like them a lot but had never attempted to emulate them, mainly because it wasn't until last year that I realized that peas can be more than a rushed accompaniment (pea puree, made with basil and olive oil, taught me that) but also because I had never seen a recipe. It is so easy that you barely need one, which worked for me because I was achey, exhausted and crabby (the dentist, nice man that he is, has that effect). Anyway to make it, you simply heat butter and olive oil in a pan, add plain flour and stir, then pour in chicken or vegetable stock; turn up the heat, add chopped spring onions and lettuce with seasoning, and simmer with the lid on for 5 minutes until tender. Squeeze in lemon juice and serve drizzled with a splash of oil.

I should admit that my taste buds probably weren't at their peak but I really liked these peas. The stock/lemon juice combo is always a winner, and the lettuce and spring onion work so well. It is simple but delicious, which is what side dishes should be, probably. Even in my over-tired, under-tasting state, I found these peas very tasty indeed and I would certainly do them again.

Tonight, as an aside, I made a gingerbread house.
It was fun, trying not to be too tacky, though there is no place at Christmas for a tasteful gingerbread house. Meanwhile, fingers crossed that my toothache vanishes tomorrow and that I can eat crunchy food again, as soft, nursery food (we had risotto tonight, which was delicious, but still...) will begin to get on my nerves. Fingers crossed that my toothache dissipates anyway because it is tiresome to live with and at the moment I can't drink the usual cold water because it hurts - and tepid water really isn't very nice. Otherwise from tomorrow afternoon I have a pretty long holiday - which is kind of exciting. Watch this space as (tooth ache permitting), I cook up a storm!

2006-12-19T11:30:00.000-08:00

Whilst I remember eating many types of seafood in France - particularly scallops and sea-snails, which I preferred to their chewier land cousins - I don't recall eating much squid. Deep-fried squid simply has to be ordered as part of a tapas selection, but I don't really cook it; the result is that I don't eat much squid despite liking it. I wasn't sure where Simon stood on squid, but it seems he too has always been partial to those deep fried rubbery rings in our favouite tapas restaurant and he certainly didn't object to trying Jamie's pasta with squid.

I bought the squid not at a friendly local fishmonger, because those are nigh-impossible to locate within a working day, but at Sainsburys. I then cleaned the squid up, followed Jamie's instructions, scored it and then sliced it, which wasn't particularly pleasant (the initial parts, not the slicing). I am working on my tendency towards squeamishness but I haven't conquered it yet - in Biology at school, I was one of the girls who squealed and ran when a rat's head was placed unceremoniously on the lab bench for our perusal. It was always going to take me longer than those kids who poked and prodded it with curiosity, rather than fear. I suppose that sums me up: I veer towards being afraid of the visceral rather than wanting to explore it further, and it takes a lot for me to tip the balance the other way. I am trying, though. Anyway having sorted out the squid, I marinaded it briefly in lemon zest and juice, chopped red chilli, parsley, garlic, and olive oil. I cooked the linguine until al dente; while it was cooking, I tossed the squid and marinade into a hot pan and stirred before adding white wine and frozen peas and cooking until the peas were tender. After draining the pasta, I stirred it into the squid and sauce and added more olive oil, lemon juice and zest, and chopped mint.

Jamie says this is a summer dish - typical of me to make it on the second really cold day of the year so far. I can imagine how great it would be in the summer with a cold glass of white, but to be honest it was pretty good in December already! I found this dish intensely and vibrantly flavourful and I gobbled it down with shameless lack of restraint. I know squid isn't everyone's cup of tea and I can see why, but I love it - and the sous chef seemed to enjoy it a lot too. There was a time when I wouldn't have touched squid with a barge pole, but I did and it was definitely worth the effort and squeamishness. Another recipe to make again - probably not for visitors, because squid is controversial, but as a speedy and incredibly tasty week night dinner for us, I can see this being made again even before the sun threatens to shine again - which, to my frozen bones, seems a long, long way ahead.

Lovely lamb shank pie

2006-12-18T12:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday it finally began to feel cold, properly cold, the kind of cold that makes your toes hurt just walking from the front door to the car parked almost outside. I am not good at cold and I had forgotten what it felt like; I really was born in the wrong place. To be honest I have been hankering after wintry comfort food not because it was freezing outside but because I fully subscribe to the illusion that December warrants comforting stodge: mash, pies, puddings. In my defence I should say that I have been cold for weeks, but I had forgotten that it can get much, much colder. Two years ago Simon and I went to Berlin in December and I experienced real cold, and even with 2 pairs of tights under my jeans I was still a walking icicle (although less so than my dad). When I was a teenager, I used to put the fan heater in my bedroom on in the summer, because moving from the hot sun into the temperate house always made me cold, and because huddling in front of heat with a novel is my idea of heaven. I also unsurprisingly like hovering by a warm stove - I definitely deserve an Aga, but obviously I don't have one. Anyway yesterday it began to be December cold and we went to a party for most of the afternoon and had snacky party food for lunch. The invitation said 'please bring an exotic dish'; I brought brownies (well they are American, aren't they? exotic, ish?) because I can make them almost blindfolded and they always work (I went for Nigella's divinely seasonal snow-flecked ones, which are fantastic) and a bottle of M and S cava. I noticed that the 'exotic' dishes looked decidedly dodgy and several people had brought shop-made sausage rolls, which hardly qualify as exotic either; there were also far too many dishes swimming in mayo, but there was a lovely bean salad and some delectable vegetable pancakes.

After the party, I made Jamie's lamb shank pie. I love lamb shanks - that doesn't need saying again. I seasoned the shanks and browned them briefly, before replacing them in the heavy based saucepan with chopped leeks, onion, carrots, turnip (not swede!), and celery, which I cooked for 15 minutes until softened, adding rosemary and thyme plus a little flour. I whizzed red wine, flour and tomato puree in the food processor and added this to the pan with the lamb shanks, brought it to the boil and simmered for 90 minutes with the lid on.

Meanwhile I rolled out bought puff pastry and cut it into strips. When the lamb had simmered for 90 minutes, I transferred it and its sauce to an ovenproof dish (the only suitably sized dish I had was, embarrassingly, a Le Creuset saucepan) , layered the strips of pastry over in an uneven rustic way, brushed with beaten egg and milk and baked for 20 minutes.

I have already admitted how much I love lamb shanks... and slow-cooked meat in red wine is simply wintery heaven for me. I don't eat pies very often but this one was thoroughly worth it - it was absolutely fantastic. I could have eaten the lamb and sauce without the pastry too - it had such a depth of flavour. One question I would have is how to serve it neatly - I couldn't figure it out, but decided it didn't matter since I don't go in that much for poncey presentation. Speaking of which I saw Gary Rhodes in his spiky haired days making prawn cocktail earlier - he made a prawn cocktail cake which was so faffy and cheffy and looked so ridiculous that it made me want to shout at the television. Who wants prawn cocktail cake when they can have lamb shank pie? Not me, at any rate.

Roasted chicken breast with cherry tomatoes and asparagus

2006-12-17T09:34:00.000-08:00

This weekend has been pretty hectic, mainly because as usual I am behind with Christmas shopping and take forever to do it. Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to catch up and was thwarted on some of my missions. We have also been out: today we spent the afternoon at a party and Friday night we went to some friends' for dinner. Going out for dinner at other people's houses is such a variable experience, depending on a) whether you like the people or not and b) what they cook. A) is less self-evident than it might seem: I can't be the only person who sometimes goes out wishing she was somewhere - anywhere - else. I hate duty socializing but it seems to be part of the modern day. B) is not what you might expect: that is, I am perfectly happy going to see people who can cook, can't cook, whatever; the issue is mainly about whether I am likely to be poisoned. I have been poisoned quite a few times; I must have a delicate stomach. When I was a student, I had a friend whose brave culinary concoctions challenged my constitution considerably. She once served a frittata that had sat in the sunshine all day; that frittata came back to haunt me - literally. She also used to collect the dregs of people's glasses and freeze it to use in cooking, which made me worry, when offered risotto, if I was tasting alcohol or saliva. I also suffered after someone served me frozen beef (don't ask) and after someone gave me Economy supermarket pork swimming in a tin of sweet peaches in a rewrite of a Jamie Oliver dish. I wish that people who don't know how to cook would start using the local deli and buy dinner in - they tend to flap madly when faced with making a meal and then risk poisoning all their guests - good shopping is an art in food terms, and you don't need to know how to cook to know how to shop. All that said, I was looking forward to Friday night's dinner with complete confidence, knowing a) I can relax and laugh with the hosts and b) they can cook. We had a lovely chicken casserole for the main course, followed by a to-die-for chocolate tart with icecream laced with brandy. Wow. And we had a really nice time, too.

Yesterday evening we came back late from shopping all day, exhausted and fractious because the December Saturday shopping experience has that effect, and so we decided on an easy dinner - Jamie's roast chicken breast with cherry tomatoes and asparagus. Its method is straightforward: for one person (I doubled amounts for the two of us), toss a chicken breast (skin-on) in a bowl with trimmed asparagus, cherry tomatoes, olive oil and rosemary leaves, then season. Put everything but the chicken in a tray and place the chicken breast on top; add an extra sprig of rosemary, then some white wine, and place in the oven for 23-25 minutes (200 C).

Serve drizzled with balsamic vinegar. The picture shows how simple this is; it doesn't show how delicious. I was worried it would be dry but it wasn't at all; it was very good indeed. All of these chicken breast recipes have been fantastic and really easy - anyone feeling tired, unsure what to cook, in the mood for chicken should invest in this book. Having said that, I would also cook these for friends because they require no last-minute frenzy, no anxious prodding when you'd rather be drinking an aperitif. Mmm.

Potato rosti

2006-12-15T10:41:00.000-08:00

I have made potato rosti before, sort of. I say sort of because it failed miserably: the grated potato was just a gluey mess. We didn't even try to eat it. It must have been two or three years ago and I made it to go with a stuffed pork tenderloin; the pork worked magically despite the faff it required to stuff it but the potatoes were definitely one of my worst culinary efforts. (I have had a few culinary creations go wrong: Delia's shortbread, which fell apart; mayonnaise, whenever I've not used the Magimix; pastry, the first time I tried - it works now; there will be more, but I have forgotten them, which is presumably how my brain copes with cooking disasters so as to deny the possibility that anything can go wrong and to allow me to carry on in the kitchen). For some reason I cook best when I have a degree of (probably misplaced) confidence; if I don't imagine recipes will fail, they tend not to. Anyway cooking isn't rocket science; anyone can do it, which makes it a levelling experience. I was wondering the other day why I like it: I hated cookery at school, which was taught by a woman we all called the Poison Dwarf (because she was small and, well, poisonous), and the Poison Dwarf never quite gave you all the information you needed to make a dish, and then would yell at you or put you on lunchtime litter picking duty if you tried to make a cake in the wrong sized tin, or burnt your fingers on the cooker. She never liked me much anyway (mainly because I was useless!) but then my mother who was also a teacher, albeit not of cookery and in a different school, met her on some training course and let slip that we called her the Poison Dwarf. That didn't really help our relationship to develop in a positive way. I learnt to cook when I left school and could mess things up without danger of having to pick up crisp packets and sweet wrappers all the way around a wet playground. I think I like cooking partly because for me it tends to involve reading, and recipes are very readable (unlike technical instructions, say); when you read a recipe you immediately begin to imagine what the end product will look and taste like, so it is an intensely bodily experience. I didn't salivate on reading Jamie's rosti recipe - it wasn't one of the ones that made me desperately eager to try it - but it definitely looked nice.

I made the rosti to go with salmon marinaded in pomegranate molasses, honey and soy (a Nigella recipe) at least partly because I remembered that pomegranate molasses in the back of the cupboard. To cook the rosti, I peeled the potatoes and sliced them into matchsticks - this, Jamie says, makes the dish less gluey than grating them would. I heated olive oil and a knob of butter in a small oven proof frying pan and then tossed the potatoes, garlic cloves and rosemary leaves in the oil and butter and cooked them in the frying pan, stirring constantly, for 10 minutes until softened slightly. The garlic posed a dilemma: the recipe instructed me to keep the cloves whole but peel them, whereas the picture quite clearly showed unpeeled cloves, so I went for personal preference and kept the cloves unpeeled as I think it makes them nicer after roasting. After the ten minutes, I transferred the pan to the preheated oven and cooked for 25 minutes, after which I removed the pan from the oven and pressed the rosti down with dampened greaseproof to compact it. At this point, the greaseproof began to stick to the rosti. This was the same greaseproof that I used for the swiss roll - it is obviously completely useless. I have never had problems with greaseproof before, but previously I was using a Lakeland version and before that an M and S version; rest assured I am going to buy a different brand before I need to use it again. Anyway I managed to peel the greaseproof off eventually and put the pan back in the oven for another 25 minutes.

While I was making the rosti, I was also decorating the Christmas tree, which we finally got round to putting up. I wasn't concentrating on the rosti - I was more interested in choosing which bauble to put where. This might explain how it is that I managed to burn it, slightly.

In the end the burnt bits weren't at all horrible - the whole dish was very nice. It didn't stick to the pan at all and it was easy enough to cut. This is an easy potato dish which I will make again (and try not to burn it next time!).

The other reason I was a bit distracted while making the rosti was that I have bought a Kitchenaid artisan mixer. I became obsessed with them and desperately wanted one; in a fit of greedy naughtiness I went and bought myself one. I haven't had time even to take it out of the box yet, but as soon as I do, I will be trying out one of those recipes that take an eternity with a bogstandard hand held electric mixer and getting a bit over excited.

Blackened barbecued pork fillets

2006-12-14T12:29:00.000-08:00

On an ill-advised leaving do at work some years ago held in the Newcastle branch of Old Orleans, I ordered blackened chicken; it arrived cremated. I sent it back; they returned another burnt offering; I gave up, and had toast when I got home. So many collective work dinners turn out that way; the thought of going out, paying a lot of money, eating burnt food and talking about work can be decidedly unappealing. Anyway I now avoid ordering 'blackened' anything like the plague, for fear of more inedible dinners. That embargo does not extend to home cooking, and my friend Kirsten had already tried Jamie's blackened pork fillets and praised them, so I was not particularly anxious about creating a home-made version of blackened food.

The recipe was easy: marinade one pork fillet per two people in a mixture of crushed cloves, cumin and fennel seeds, paprika, orange zest and juice, thyme, garlic, ketchup and balsamic vinegar for at least an hour but up to half a day. When you're ready, barbecue or grill them until nicely charred.

I should say at this point that our grill is ridiculously feeble; it char-grills only in the loosest possible sense, but it did eventually succeed. I served this with sweet potato and carrot mash, and sprouts (okay the sprouts don't particularly go, but I had some to use up... and they tasted good!).

I enjoyed this dinner, but not as much as I would have had it been barbecued on a proper hot flame. Similarly I think the whole vibe of the barbecued dish would be better in July than in deepest darkest December; it worked, but it didn't make my taste buds sing. That will teach me to try dishes that would, I could tell as I ate it, be fabulous in the summer, in December.

Reading this back, I don't at all want to imply that I didn't like this - we both liked it a lot. I do feel, though, that food tastes differently according to the climate, and I could imagine this on a hot summer's day with a cold beer, as Matt Skinner suggests, more than on a windy December dark night with a glass of red. I will make it again, but I'll wait until the seasons change.

On another note, my lovely husband has ordered me some gingerbread syrup as I have been wanting it since I read Nigella's 'Christmas in a glass' recipe in the Radio Times. How lucky am I? We have also, finally. put up the tree, and the house feels gloriously Christmassy and I predictably feel that the holidays have begun, which obviously they have not. I had better wait for that gingerbread syrup to arrive.

Ravioli with pecorino, potato and mint

2006-12-13T11:14:00.000-08:00

I realize that I have arguably been over-generous to France as the country that introduced me to proper food and that I might need to redress the balance somewhat by presenting an alternative image of eating habits in France that go far beyond all the anecdotes about red wine, garlic and longevity. I could point out that France is currently nearly as preoccupied as we are with childhood obesity, although their school dinners, in my experience, were immeasurably better. I won't, though, because I marked a whole pile of essays on 'l'effet Jamie Oliver en France' last year on that very subject and it has bored me somewhat of the whole topic (no offence to the worthy campaigns about children's eating habits - just that they don't need my input). Instead, I would rather talk about a little 'departement' in northern France, Picardie, that happened to be twinned with County Durham where I grew up, and where we were inevitably sent on school trips. I went there aged 12 for a week-long school trip staying in a scary centre for school children, with apparently minimal security and the kind of food that 12 year old picky British kids will not eat. I returned aged 13 for an exchange visit and stayed in my penpal's house; I can't remember anything I ate except banana cereal, which made me gag, so I had to pretend to be someone who couldn't eat breakfast and then go hungry until lunchtime. The reason I mention all this now, though, is the third trip, when I was 16, again with the school but this time for work experience, although younger kids on the trip were there to do an exchange (my brother, for example). This time I was accommodated in a very odd household for which I was totally unprepared. I had begun A-level French and we had been taught to converse on various topics that would, we were told, come in useful at the dinner table in France - that is, the recent regional elections; the position of France in the Common Market; Maastricht, and whether or not Eurodisney would work longterm. Fab topics, obviously, just the sort of thing we all like to pontificate on at the end of a day's work. Not. Anyway, I arrived primed and ready to spout forth my second hand opinions, and found myself in a household where no one knew there had been elections in France or what the Maastricht treaty was. They were obviously very poor: there was no furniture apart from a dining table and a television; beyond the dining area we all sat on the floor. There were 5 children but only 3 bedrooms; a bathroom with a door that wouldn't close (which led me to shower in a dressing gown...) - and at night they would creep into my room and stare at me so I was too unnerved to go to sleep. Furthermore, the food was awful. Every night, they opened a catering sized tin of ravioli in tomato sauce and fed me that with stale bread; I ate before them, for no apparent reason, while they stood in a line and watched me and I tried bravely to talk, but they just flinched at all my conversational gambits. I couldn't bear it: I bought a book of Maupassant's short stories and read them unhappily, and listened to my Walkman. I gave up trying to speak and just read, and wrote letters, until the school registered just how dire it was and moved me, whereupon the family all cried, feeling I had let them down - it seemed that they had liked having me, and it turned out I was their first ever guest. Probably their last, too. I was moved into a teacher's house, where the teacher had a huge party with caviar and an ice sculpture and a friend and I were bored waitresses, but it was a ridiculous jump from the tinned ravioli. The point of this story was simply to show that I do know that not everyone in France eats fantastically well all the time and that ravioli is not always a good thing.

This latter point was picked up by my brother who asked what I was having for dinner, and, when told, commented that he didn't like the sound of cheese with mint and made silly remarks about whether the next thing would be Polo mints with feta cheese. When he says things like this, I remember what he was like when he was a kid. I ignored him, obviously, and went on to make Jamie's ravioli anyway. We have made fresh pasta quite a few times now but this was only our third go at ravioli, which is by far the most fun part of making pasta because the little parcels (flying saucers as Freya called them...) are so amazing.

I won't go through how to make pasta, but we (making pasta involves 2 chefs rather than me and a sous-chef in our house...) made the pasta dough and chilled it while I made the filling: potatoes, baked for an hour in a hot oven, cooled slightly, flesh scooped out and mixed with lemon zest, pecorino, mint, butter and nutmeg. We used a ravioli tray to make up the ravioli and it worked perfectly - in fact the whole experience was easier than usual, which I ascribe to the fact that I used OO flour instead of 0 'pasta flour' which is all Tesco sell, and I kneaded more than usual. There was no dangerous moment where the pasta almost tore; no possibility that it might fail. It just worked.

Making ravioli is such an easy and pleasurable way of feeling domestic goddessy. Having made the little ravioli, I boiled them for 3 and a half minutes, while heating butter in a frying pan. I drained the ravioli (or rather the sous-chef did) and I then added the ravioli to the frying pan with a little of its cooking water and simmered a bit until the water and butter coated the ravioli like a light sauce. I sprinkled with whole mint leaves and shaved pecorino.

This ravioli was utterly delicious - for me, the best fresh pasta dish I have ever had, let alone made. I loved the combination of flavours, as I told my brother this morning; no one should scoff at this delectable dinner, let alone brothers who want a Christmas present. This is right up there for me in the super league of the best dishes out of this book, and it fits the book's ethos perfectly - fun to make, simple, classic, and indescribably better than any ready made version of the same.

Nigella's aromatic ham

2006-12-12T10:45:00.000-08:00

Like so many other people, I watched Nigella last week and thought how beautifully wintry she looked: her dark hair and eyes; her white and red and black clothes; her festive food and house. She wrote a book called Forever Summer but she herself suits winter far better and in fact her food seems to appeal more to me in the cold weather - even the summery foods that she concocts in Forever Summer. In a way, Feast, the book that followed Forever Summer, might be called Forever Festivals (OK so it might if Nigella had as bad a taste in titles as me...); most of the recipes seem suited to implicitly autumnal or winter occasions - Halloween, Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving, as well as Christmas. Anyway last Wednesday I curled up with Nigella in festive mode, and as always, she infected me with Yuletide spirit - me, who hasn't even taken the tree out of its box yet. Food is always guaranteed to draw me to occasions more than anything else and so it proved; I spent a good part of Saturday seeking gingerbread syrup to make Nigella's 'Christmas in a glass', but I didn't actually find any, despite trying three overcrowded branches of Starbucks, a shop I never, ever enter. See - even Scrooge wouldn't have resisted Nigella.

On Sunday I decided to try Nigella's aromatic spiced ham, the new version of the fully festive ham that appears in Feast and a relative of the ham in Coca Cola and ham in Cherry Coke that Nigella has become known for. I intended to try it with Jamie's creamy butternut squash, following the example of the lovely Gravy Queen who pops up here occasionally, but my newly bought squash was off and I had to abandon it. Instead I did mustard mash (with lovely lovely Yukon Gold potatoes), roast sweet potato and carrot, and sprouts to accompany the ham, letting loose my inner huffy child to mutter darkly about Tesco's shortcomings and wishing our farm shop had had some butternut squash to prevent me having to fall back on Tesco's over-travelled produce. Cooking the ham was delightfully simple: I boiled it in a mix of water, red wine, fennel, onion, star anise, coriander seeds, fennel seeds, and garlic, until cooked. Then I peeled off the rind and some of the fat, cut a diamond pattern into the remaining fat and studded each intersection of the diamonds with a clove. Meanwhile I simmered redcurrant jelly, cinnamon, paprika and red wine vinegar until it became a syrup and then glazed the ham with it, before replacing the ham (sitting on foil on a baking tray to avoid mess) in the oven at 230 degrees for 15 minutes.

The picture should speak for itself - this ham is sublime. I love Nigella's ham in cherry Coke but this is just as good, definitely. I haven't tried the fully festive ham from Feast, so I can't compare it, but this was absolutely delicious. And it worked well with my improvised veggie side dishes.

Mmm - this was a very nice dinner, and very easy. I am sure my squash recipe would have gone well with it to, but it wasn't to be (see how calm I can be when I want to be). I can vouch for the deliciousness of the ham as leftovers in sandwiches too, with some lovely red onion confit from Rick Stein's that my brother and sister-in-law brought us for our wedding. Gourmet sandwiches indeed - and barely any effort, which is a bonus.

1980s style Black Forest Swiss Roll

2006-12-11T09:46:00.000-08:00

When we started German at school, for some reason one of the first things we learnt was 'Schwarzwalderkirschtorte', Black Forest cherry gateau. I think we probably thought that all Germans ate that every day, in the same way that we had a hazy notion that French people lived on croissants for breakfast and then baguette for lunch before snails and frogs' legs for dinner (I didn't - I spent enough time in France to know better - but those language textbooks were really peddling a certain culinary image of the countries whose languages they were teaching - and that image was really quite convincing). To be honest, 80s Black Forest cherry gateau stands as an emblem of all the desserts I used to hate - oozy, creamy, fruit in it, all in all a bit messy, really. I always liked cake and flapjack, but not the oozy icing in a Victoria sponge, or anything squidgy, in terms of dessert; I would never have eaten this dish, in times gone by. I am, however, a reformed character prepared to boldly go where never I went before, and thus I set to making this swiss roll version of a Black Forest cherry cake, cheerfully dismissing any lurking phobias that might have raised their ugly heads in the process.

My cooking began badly - I lost the cocoa powder. Our kitchen is small - large enough for a table and four chairs, but hardly enormous - and I have a lot of kitchen equipment and even more food and baking ingredients. I still haven't found the cocoa powder that I am sure is there (unless the kitchen gremlins got it - they seem to haunt my kitchen) but Simon graciously, or rather a tad grumpily, went off to Tesco and replenished my supply. I then set to whisking together eggs and caster sugar with my little hand held electric whisk. Jamie said that after 2-3 minutes the mixture would have tripled in size and a dripping beater would leave ribbons of eggy foam visible on the surface after 10 seconds. Hmm. Mine had expanded but not to triple its size and drips from the beater disappeared instantly into the mix, after 3 minutes. I continued until mine did what it was supposed to, but it took time. Then I whisked in melted butter and folded in sifted plain flour and cocoa before scooping it onto a swiss roll tin lined with greaseproof paper. I baked for 15 minutes until the sponge sprang back and then removed it from the oven and tin but, keeping it on the greaseproof, put it on a rack to cool.

To make the filling, I heated orange zest and juice with caster sugar in a saucepan until the sugar had dissolved. I added cherries and cooked until softened. (I used cherries in Kirsch, and then used the Kirsch later). I turned off the heat and added 2 'good splashes' of Kirsch from the cherry jar, cooled, then strained through a sieve, reserving cherries and syrup.

To make the chocolate cream, I heated 1/4 of the total amount of double cream until it bubbled then removed from the heat and mixed in Green and Blacks sour cherry chocolate. I whipped the rest of the cream until it formed stuff peaks.

Finally - assembly time! Keeping the cake on the greaseproof paper, I brushed the cake with cherry syrup and then spread it with chocolate cream, then the whipped cream, then the cherries. At this point I had to roll it up but as I tried, the cake stuck scarily to the greaseproof paper and I panicked - I have always used greaseproof from Lakeland, but it had run out and this was from Tesco, which led me to start blaming Tesco for my failing dessert. (I like to blame Tesco. They can cope with a bit of bashing from me, since their profits are phenomenal and they are known for ruthless trading. Heaven forbid a mistake should come from me, when there is Tesco around as a useful scape goat). The sous-chef, however, managed to roll the cake while prising it awkwardly from its greaseproof coating and it worked, to my complete amazement. We wrapped it not in the over-sticky greaseproof but in cling film and stuck it in the fridge to set.

I forgot to trim the ends and scatter chocolate shavings over, or to dust it with icing sugar. I think that was because by then I had more reason to curse Tesco - the butternut squash I bought there yesterday was off when I cut into it, and by then all the shops were closed. The air was turning slowly blue. Anyway I think the roll looks okay despite my failure to dress it up suitably.

This dessert was much harder for me than the chocolate tart, which was actually quite easy once you got past the idea that you were making chocolate pastry. I'd never made a swiss roll before and the rolling part spooked me a bit, not to mention my eggs and sugar taking forever to whisk together properly. That all said, this is really nice - not too claggy, not too heavy, not any of those things I have always associated with Black Forest cherry gateau. In fact, it is quite delicate somehow - and thoroughly delicious.

Somehow I don't think I'd win a talent contest with the appearance of my roll - which is more flat than roll-like - but I really don't care about that. I am really proud that we managed to make this work and it tastes really good; it's the sort of thing you actually want to eat. Cherries, chocolate, sponge and booze- as Jamie says, a match made in heaven - even if it does make you feel like you've returned to what Lindsay Bareham and Simon Hopkinson are calling 'the prawn cocktail years'. What was wrong with the prawn cocktail years, anyway?

Indian-style broccoli with spiced yoghurt

2006-12-10T12:50:00.000-08:00

Some people, my father-in-law included, think broccoli is almost too boring to eat. I happen to like broccoli, as long as it isn't overcooked and mushy, which sadly it so often is; I admit that I have been known to overcook my own broccoli, but in general I manage not to. Anyway I like broccoli, I love spices and I like natural yoghurt (I have trouble with flavoured yoghurts, but I love Greek yoghurt and bio-active plain stuff; it's when it is oddly flavoured or has fruity bits in that it makes me gag) so this recipe was an obvious choice to accompany a curry.

The curry I made was from this month's Delicious magazine, courtesy of Atul Kochnar who we saw on the Great British Menu in the spring. It is a lamb curry and simple enough to make: just onions, garlic, spices, lamb, tomatoes and water, plus coriander to garnish. No cream, no nuts, no yoghurt. I thought this would work well with Jamie's broccoli so it seemed like an ideal moment to try the spiced broccoli. To make the broccoli dish, I boiled the broccoli for about 4 minutes, drained and tossed in a little oil before grilling it briefly. Meanwhile I toasted cumin and fennel seeds and cardomom seeds before bashing them in my pestle and mortar; I then stirred most of them into the yoghurt with lemon zest and juice and some seasoning. I served the broccoli with the spiced yoghurt spooned over and sprinkled with the remaining spice mix.

The broccoli was very nice indeed - and it looked kind of pretty, which (to my shallow mind) helps to lift it from the status of Boring Vegetable. It went very well with the lamb and simple steamed Basmati rice.

Very nice! In fact the curry was a bit hot for us so the broccoli (while not bland) worked really well with it, calming it down and giving a different depth of flavour. I loved the spiced yoghurt and would make that for all sorts of green veg as well as broccoli (green beans, I could imagine it with, for instance...). Here, broccoli is more than a boring nutritional powerhouse - it actually has taste and texture, for which Jamie (or Amaya, where he says he tasted this dish first) deserves some credit. Curry night can easily be unhealthy, or at best nutritionally neutral - the solution is clearly to add broccoli and some spicy yoghurt!

Jesmond Dene House

2006-12-09T12:41:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows that you can tell a lot about a person from the newspaper he or she buys. You can also, I would suggest, tell a lot about people from the sections of the newspaper that they choose to read - and if so, my newspaper-reading habits probably show me in a less than favourable light. I read the food pages, the restaurant reviews, the book reviews (and even then I skip much of the non-fiction), the fashion pages that feature real clothes and not the incomprehensible rags that the fashion industry puts forward for its stick insect models, and Barbara Ellen. That is it, basically. I tend to skip the news (this probably makes me a Very Bad Person), finance, sport (unless Wimbledon is on, when I read the tennis pages vaguely obsessively), travel (is it me or do the travel supplements always feature beautiful remote islands that would cost a year's salary to get to, whilst criticising the only holiday destinations I am likely to be able to afford?), and the celebrity gossip. What this says about me is probably as follows: greedy dreamer who prefers to wallow in fiction rather than reality, and who hasn't learnt to aspire. I think that may be true - I really don't care that some people can afford to travel more than me, or wear dresses that cost £1000. What does all that matter?

I do, however, get irritated by the sorts of people who can afford to eat in posh restaurants but don't really like food. We can all remember Hell's Kitchen when Gordon spotted two stick insects asking for undressed lettuce for dinner. What kind of restaurant can cater for a supermodel, or even a wannabe model? I like to think I could be a reasonably discerning eater, but I definitely couldn't be a restaurant critic - they are a species apart from us mere mortals, not least because someone pays for their dinner. Why should I trust the opinion of someone whose dinner came on expenses and who eats that kind of meal once a week? Those bloggers who review restaurants have democratized the art of restaurant reviews and the real, paid-for, brigade are effectively, arguably, redundant - in the sense that we read them, avidly, but we tend to seek opinions via Google before looking through newspaper archives. And Google tends to lead us to what the common people think.

As a foodie commoner, I am incredibly proud to announce that my lovely husband took me to a beautiful restaurant last night: Jesmond Dene House. This is owned and run by Terry Laybourne, who set up what was 21 Queen Street (and is now Cafe 21) in Newcastle, won a Michelin star (a first for Newcastle!) and champions local produce. I bought his book last weekend and have been reading eagerly about our local food heroes; Simon knew that, and booked us a table at Jesmond Dene House. What a star! Before we went, I inevitably googled reviews of the restaurant, which were reassuringly glowing - the risk of the internet is finding out the weaknesses in something you are about to do just before you do it, but in this case it was all good.

I am not a restaurant reviewer; I am definitely one of the common people who pays for her own dinner (ahem, actually Simon paid, but still...), and I lack those tortuous turns of phrase that clog up many a newspaper professional restaurant review. From my point of view, then: I started my dnner with a hot potato waffle with local smoked salmon, avruga caviar and cream. I think this was the nicest dish I have ever eaten: it all seemed to melt into my mouth, like dream-food, almost. Simon had langoustine fritters with shaved fennel salad and lemon mayo, which looked more of this world but were, to his mind, equally mind-blowing. My main was roast monkfish fillet with savoy cabbage 'a la creme', mushrooms, onion, bacon and red wine sauce; again it was delicious, but perhaps less out of this world than Simon's Organic Aberdeen Angus plate with 2 celeries (I think he will continue to rave about the slow-cooked beef shoulder for some time). To finish, I had chocolate fondant with white choc sorbet and Simon had pernod mousse with blackcurrant sorbet; I can't speak for his (he seemed to love it), but mine was to die for. In fact, the whole meal (starting with Kir Royale, for me, and ending with espresso and petits fours) was so far removed from anything that I have eaten before that I am struggling to describe how amazing it was. It's easy for the professionals; they can compare. For me, it felt as though eating had turned into a whole new, dreamier, smoother experience; it was as though my palate was readjusting to a magical new world of tastes.

I hope I will eventually go back there. I love cooking, and I love discovering new recipes, but eating out can be such a fabulous experience, and it can be miserably disappointing. This time it was incredible. I might read the professionals' opinion in the Sunday supplements and see if they agree, but if they don't, tough - they are, presumably, looking for the foodie equivalent of a £6000 holiday in a remote corner of an unheard of Greek island or a 'dress' for the modern stick insect, and as such, their opinions are to be read but not taken as gospel. Food, like everything else, is both hierarchical and democratic, and I am profoundly grateful that I had the chance to experience last night's amazing dinner.

Pan-fried scallops with lentils, crispy pancetta and lemon creme fraiche

2006-12-08T10:19:00.000-08:00

I can still remember my first scallop - I was twenty, teaching in the south of France, and at a dinner party was given foie gras and coquilles St-Jacques - as a taste of heaven. I had written sanctimonious A-level French essays on the evils of foie gras and I was torn between eating it to be polite and refusing it to be ethical; I did eat some, but I don't remember how it tasted - I must have been feeling too guilty to taste it properly. I do remember the scallops though - it was one of my defining moments in the road to taking food seriously. I haven't eaten that many scallops since - the rubbery variety in so many Chinese restaurants hardly inspire me - but I have continued to put them high on my food pedestal. Since Simon now likes scallops too, I was longing to try this scallops dish with Puy lentils, pancetta and creme fraiche, partly because it looks fabby in Jamie's picture but partly because, let's face it, it sounds droolsomely like the sort of dish I would order, salivating, in a nice restaurant. Which isn't so off the mark since Jamie's blurb says that this is served in Fifteen.

This was a fun dish to make. I cooked the lentils in water with a bay leaf, tomato, potato, and 2 unpeeled garlic cloves, simmering for 20-25 minutes until soft (but not mushy). Then I drained off most of the water, got rid of the bay leaf and the tomato and garlic skins, and mashed the potato and tomato into the lentils. Well I would have, only my waxy potato remained resolutely solid and resisted my mashing, so I mashed some of it and discarded the rest.

To make the lemon creme fraiche I simply mixed half fat creme fraiche with the juice of a lemon, salt and pepper (measuring the lemon juice by tasting it until it had a twang - cook's privilege...).

Meanwhile, I fried the rashers of pancetta in a hot pan until golden and crisp, removing them and placing asparagus spears and scallops in the pan in their place, so that they cooked in the bacon fat until golden. I removed these, added olive oil to the pan and fried some sage leaves until crisp.

To serve, I divided the lentils between the plates and put the scallops on top, scattering the pancetta, asparagus and sage over them and finishing off with a generous dollop of lemony creme fraiche.

The picture doesn't at all convey quite how divine this dinner was. I have a new favourite! I loved the contrasting flavours and textures; I loved how the scallops and asparagus had inhaled the bacon fat; I loved the whole thing. A really fun dish to cook and eat and absolutely delicious - another little taste of heaven.

I was thinking earlier about what this project has done for me. Some people have asked fairly bluntly what the point is. I am sure the point is not to be able to say I have cooked every recipe in Jamie's latest book - that would be incredibly sad, in every sense of the word. To me, the point is mainly cooking different things, trying the recipes that I would typically ignore. Apparently most people don't try more than 3 recipes from any one cookbook; many try none. That means that we might never leave our comfort zone - might never learn to be challenged by different techniques or flavours. I feel I have left my comfort zone, and Simon has certainly left his, and that is incredibly exciting because the dishes you might never have given a second glance at sometimes can really surprise you and you open yourself up to a whole world of new tastes, which is intimidating as well as fun. Scallops, for anyone who hasn't tried them, are a fantastic place to start, as long as you don't start with the rubbery supermarket ones, because, I promise you, they really are the angels of the food world.

Spicy pangrattato risotto

2006-12-07T10:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was an exceedingly long and tiring day for me - I travelled to Liverpool for a work trip, and back, in one day. The train journey varies between three and a half and nearly four hours, plus travel to and from the station here and car ride at the other end. I had to get up insanely early and worrying about the alarm not going off kept me awake most of Tuesday night, which was a predictable start to the day. The journey there and back in itself was quite pleasant, if that isn't an odd thing to say about a train ride; the trains were busy but only the last leg between York and Newcastle was noisy, thanks to drunk Scottish men (who always seem to be on trains with me...). Otherwise, it was relatively quiet and I managed to read two admittedly slim but thoroughly depressing recent French novels - as well as having a Nigella gingerbread muffin for breakfast, which was a self-awarded treat. The whole day went well, but it felt long, and I was exhausted when I staggered into the house. I had known I would be and in a Blue Peter moment, I had managed to make risotto base on Tuesday evening and refrigerate it to finish off quickly on Wednesday night. I am very proud of that Blue Peter moment because it is uncharacteristic, but I was determined not to end up with rehashed student food. I wanted gently warming comfort food to eat out of a bowl, and risotto, now it has become a fast food thanks to Jamie's cunning system of pre-cooking the base, is perfect.

I say perfect. Sadly, and predictably given how tired I was, I managed to burn the pangrattato - the spicy breadcrumbs to go on top of the risotto. Basically, I had to whiz lemon zest, dried red chillies, garlic, anchovies and bread pieces in a food processor with some oil from the anchovies and then fry in a little oil until darkened and crisp. Sounds easy - is easy - but I was too tired to concentrate and also I was a little hasty in assuming that my blitzing had finished, so my breadcrumbs weren't very uniform, which also contributed to the overall effect: some crumbs darkened, some burnt, some not very dark. I sampled it and decided it was fine - the un-darkened crumbs had gone crispy and the burnt ones tasted okay, so I went for it, finishing off the risotto and sprinkling the crumbs over.

This was really nice. It would have been better if I hadn't messed up the pangrattato, but I am sure I did so mainly because I was so tired. I was also in a hurry because I wanted to see Nigella's Christmas Kitchen, which I really enjoyed. I know Nigella is incredibly kitsch at Christmas and does a lot of pouting into the camera, but that programme yesterday conveyed Christmas festive cheer amazingly well. Watching it, I felt Christmas had come already - and certainly I'd love to have Nigella feed me at Christmas. My main preparation so far has been to order the turkey - a Bronze - from a local farm shop, plus a couple of ribs of beef to roast. I know my turkey is still enjoying a happy life - although it might not be looking forward to Christmas as much as I am. I am also looking forward to Nigella's 'Christmas in a glass' (gingerbread syrup and prosecco...) and some festive ham, and a Yule log which I think I want to make this year. But if anyone fancies writing some Christmas cards for me, I will be very grateful.

Baked potatoes stuffed with bacon, anchovies and sage

2006-12-06T10:56:00.000-08:00

Baked potatoes are real autumn/winter food, comfort food of the highest order, unless they are prepared by the cafe five floors below my office, where potatoes appear to be baked early in the morning and then left to harden on a warmish plate for hours on end until they are requested, when they are stuffed with over-salted fillings and sold at an exorbitant price. Those baked potatoes would be enough to turn me off potatoes for life, except that proper baked potatoes can be so good (for anyone who hasn't tried them, Delia's baked potatoes with leek and Boursin are utterly delicious...).

Jamie's baked potatoes are slightly different - not the huge meal-in-themselves that the term 'baked potato' probably conjures up, although they could be if you used large potatoes. He suggests medium waxy potatoes; mine were pretty small, so I did two each. It couldn't be easier: preheat the oven to 200C, and stick the end of either an apple corer or a conventional (not speed) peeler into the potato and twist it round as you cut right through it, as though you are coring it. Prick each potato with a fork a few times and rub in olive oil and sea salt. For each potato take a rasher of bacon and top it with 2 sage leaves, an anchovy fillet, a sliver of garlic and lemon zest. Wrap it into a sort of sausage shape and stuff the potato with it; you can use the cores of the potatoes, halved, to plug the ends of each potato. Bake the potatoes for an hour or so, turning every so often, until nicely cooked.

I served the potatoes with lamb leg steaks and peas cooked in a mix of stock and water. I will admit that the picture (above) doesn't give much insight into the potatoes; the stuffing is invisible once the potatoes are cooked. These potatoes were, however, utterly scrumptious. Anchovy-haters need not worry; the anchovies lend a depth of flavour that is not particularly anchovy-like. The potatoes were crunchy on the outside and tender inside; the stuffing made them particularly good to eat and I will definitely try this again, because it was easy but really tasty, which is ideal for a mid-week supper, or even for a side-dish in a dinner-party context (you may gather that I don't do 'dinner parties' as such, just friends round for dinner...). You could easily vary the stuffing ingredients - I am imagining the bacon rasher with sundried tomatoes and basil and even cheese. Jamie's vegetable dishes are unbelievably good - so good that my mother, who was brought up on home-cooked everything and yearned for shop-bought cake as a child, then grew up to become a working mum with little time to spend in the kitchen, and now loves to read cookbooks but rarely actually cooks from them - actually asked me to give her a copy of the book and has tried quite a few of these vegetable dishes to great result. Honestly - Jamie has converted Simon to mussels and scallops and my mother to cooking out of a cook book - whatever will happen next? Maybe I will start eating raw tomatoes...

Pan-fried lemon sole fillets with salsa verde

2006-12-05T12:30:00.000-08:00

There was a time, somewhere in between the Picky Years and the Adventurous Years (i.e. the last few years), when I was neither picky nor particularly adventurous: during that time I was a student. I was a student for a long time - a four year BA, a one year Masters and a three year PhD. I got used to living on a tiny stipend and eating within a budget; I got used to pooling resources and concocting weird combinations of food with similarly economically-challenged friends. I ate a lot of stirfry, with a lot of cheap veggies (courgettes, onions, carrots) and not a lot of meat; I ate masses of bacon, chopped into pasta sauces or into stirfries, or on top of an array of steamed vegetables, and I ate tinned tuna. Wine tended to cost 2.99 a bottle, 3.99 if I was pushing the boat out or had been invited out for dinner (I had some standards). Anyway during those times I mainly ate spicy food -stirfries, curries, pasta with chilli-style sauces - and I forgot that somewhere out there people still ate meat or fish and two veg. I hardly ever, ever ate a potato - I thought that was what cavemen ate. When I went out for dinner, it was often pizza, curry or Thai; sometimes we went to Cafe rouge and very very occasionally we went to Brown's for steak. Then I moved and started work and work-life is different from student-life, and I got more interested in food because I wasn't perpetually skint/rushing out to the pub/eating Marmite on toast with my neighbours, and I could finally afford fresh fish.

All this comes as a preamble mainly because I realized yesterday while cooking that I would have despised what I was cooking in times gone by. Fillets of fish, potatoes, broccoli. How boring can you get? And yet now I find this sort of food immensely soothing (I still eat a lot of spicy food too - or I did before I started this project!). A couple of caveats: I used plaice not lemon sole as I had plaice and not lemon sole. I also hate the term pan-fried (it goes with oven-roasted as utterly pointless) but I can see its relevance: plain 'fried fish' sounds like the battered deep fried chip shop special, and probably puts the home cook off. Finally I have never made salsa verde before although I have eaten it a few times- my parents brought me some back from Spain and I liked it a lot. It is always good to learn how to cook something you've only ever eaten out of a jar.

Jamie said this was incredibly speedy. I was not incredible speedy, mainly because all the chopping required for the salsa verde took me an eternity (and in fact my lovely sous-chef took over!). Anyway to make salsa verde, you chop garlic and add capers, chopped gherkins, anchovies, parsley, basil and mint, then Dijon mustard, red wine vinegar, and olive oil, plus pepper. It sounds very easy and it was easy, but I am not a particularly speedy chopper.

I boiled some salad potatoes and steamed broccoli (Jamie suggested purple sprouting - I only had calabrese). Meanwhile, I tossed the plaice fillets in salt, pepper and flour and then fried in olive oil and a little butter. Jamie instructs to then wait 20 seconds before squeezing in lemon juice, which I did.

I served with pan juices drizzled over and salsa verde spooned over fish and vegetables.

This was really nice, despite my little changes to the recipe. Salsa verde is really, really good - though anchovy-haters beware; the anchovies in it don't melt away as they do when cooked into sauces. I know the pic makes the meal look a bit white and green but it was very nice, honestly! Salsa verde is tasty and fresh; it has a kind of zing that makes you feel alive when you eat it (as opposed to say, risotto, which makes you feel cocooned). If only I were a better chopper, this would be a very speedy dinner. I need to improve my knife skills! Thank goodness for the sous-chef, who has infinitely better knife skills than me and a lot more patience - and who eats, appreciates and supports this project on a near-daily basis. Mmm - another recipe that I look forward to repeating.

The best onion gratin

2006-12-04T10:50:00.000-08:00

I have always been a fan of onions, cheese and cream. I first discovered this combination thanks to Jamie's stunning baked onions from Happy Days - onions boiled till tender then stuffed with a creamy cheesey mixture, and wrapped in pancetta or bacon, for anyone who hasn't yet tasted this unbelievably good onion recipe. The recipe for onion gratin in Cook with Jamie looks equally divine and I was sure it would go well with the braised red cabbage described below and with roast pork. To be honest the photo of these onions alone is enough to make anyone go weak at the knees; I have been eagerly anticipating them, but I wanted to cook them with something that they wouldn't overpower and that would allow them to be celebrated in their own right. Roast pork seemed ideal.

The method is easy but the cooking time is quite long. First, quarter 1 red onion per person and then break the quarters into 'petals'. Place in an oven dish and drizzle with olive oil and seasoning, before adding thyme leaves and sliced garlic. Mix, add white wine and cover with a double thickness of foil before baking for 45 minutes in an oven preheated to 200C. Remove the foil and return to the oven for 15 minutes. Lower the oven to 180 , stir creme fraiche into the onions and sprinkle with grated Gruyere and parmesan, before baking for another 15 mins or so until golden.
These onions are, as I anticipated, heavenly. They have masses of flavour and taste fantastic. They also went really well with the roast loin of pork and red cabbage. My plateful, below, was a little piece of heaven in itself. Roast meat is sometimes seen as a bit boring, and meat and two veg probably sounds very oldfashioned - but this was all absolutely delicious and a delight to eat.

Must-try red cabbage braised with apple, bacon and balsamic vinegar

2006-12-04T10:34:00.000-08:00

Red cabbage, to me, always feels gloriously Christmassy and festive; this is probably due to its colour as much as its flavour. Cabbage is a much underrated vegetable - I am as guilty as the next person of despising it, not least because the building I work in has, shall we say, ventilation problems, so sometimes my office smells of boiled cabbage despite being five floors above the canteen. This said, cabbage can be really good if it is cooked well and red cabbage in apple and bacon is always welcome. I particularly like Jamie's version thanks to the balsamic vinegar he puts in (I have a bit of a thing about balsamic vinegar) - I have made this dish before, a couple of months ago, but didn't include it in the blog because we had friends around and I didn't want to start taking photos of the food. (Since then, I have given up worrying and just go ahead and take pictures regardless - people don't seem to mind)

It is simple: for a whole red cabbage, heat olive oil in a saucepan, add finely sliced smoked streaky bacon and a tablespoon of bashed fennel seeds and cook until golden, before adding a peeled and sliced onion and cooking with the lid on for a couple more minutes until golden and sticky. Add 2 peeled and chopped apples (use eating apples, not cooking ones), then the red cabbage, cut into chunks, seasoning and 150ml balsamic vinegar and stir together. Cook with a lid on on a low heat for an hour, pop a knob of butter on top and sprinkle over chopped flat leaf parsley.
The photo colour makes this look horribly lurid - I promise that this was the light. This is a very nice dish indeed and it went extremely well as Jamie promised with roast pork. I also served it with onion gratin, which I will blog next. This is definitely a dish to repeat in the festive season - and in fact I think it will become my new favourite way of serving red cabbage.

In order to show that I haven't cooked nothing but vegetables recently, I also made Nigella's gingerbread muffins which are delicious indeed - they taste and smell really Christmassy and are a perfect (and simple) December treat.

Roasted chicken breast wrapped in pancetta with leeks and thyme

2006-12-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

Chicken breast wrapped in pancetta or bacon is one of my favourite dishes to cook - incredibly easy, tasty, and very presentable. My brother Stuart kick-started this some years ago with a lovely chicken breast smeared with Boursin, wrapped in bacon and braised in a mix of stock, red wine and sugar. I can't remember where he got the recipe from, but it quickly became a family favourite. Since then I have experimented with quite a few versions - I like one with parmesan stuffed into the breast and cooked in Marsala and cream; one stuffed with sundried tomatoes, mozzarella and basil and baked; one with roasted peppers inside... the list goes on. I also like chicken saltimbocca with sage and proscuitto. In fact, I don't think I've ever disliked a stuffed chicken breast recipe, so I knew Jamie's version would go down a treat. Funnily enough this recipe attracted Stuart's attention too -he doesn't own this book, but there is a copy floating around his workplace, which he appears to peruse in his coffee breaks, before coming back and bossily asking why I haven't tried x y z recipe yet. This recipe was ideal for Saturday night (easy and accessible) and it enabled me to watch the X factor without too much cooking time, which is a good bonus.

The method is simple and serves 1; I doubled it. Put chicken breast in a large bowl with a trimmed leek sliced into 0.5cm pieces, leaves from a few sprigs of fresh thyme, a good glug of olive oil, a small knob of butter, and a small swig of white wine and toss together. Tip all but the chicken into a small roasting dish or tray and wrap the chicken breast in six or seven slices of pancetta. Drizzle with olive oil, place a couple of thyme sprigs on top and cook in an oven preheated to 200 C for 25 to 35 minutes.

You can see from the above pic that this is another of those nifty dishes that comes out of the oven looking really nice. It would make a great dinner party dish because you just shove it in the oven and leave it and because when you take it out, you could just take the dish to the table. (Well, I could. I suspect Gary Rhodes would not). I served this with cheesey peas, which I described in the previous post.

This was another lovely dinner, simple but really nice. I ought to confess that when I doubled the suggested 'small swig of wine', it became less a large swig or 2 small swigs than a mini flood. This didn't seem to hurt the final result though - it was v nice. I think next time I might stuff the chicken breast too, not with cheese, I think, but maybe with roasted peppers and basil, or artichoke hearts. There will definitely be a next time, though, and I will be recommending it to the rest of my family as a new version of our old favourite.

Cheesey peas

2006-12-03T01:03:00.000-08:00

The title of this recipe is one reason why I like Jamie's books. Cheesey peas, in the hands of a more pretentious food writer, would have become risotto of petits pois, or parmesan-infused peas, or some other serious-sounding title: cheesey peas is really not the name of a dish taking itself too seriously. On the other hand, cheesey peas sounds like something people might actually want to eat - particularly children - which is enough to take a recipe seriously enough to make it.

This recipe hardly requires effort: boil the peas as usual, return to pan saving a small amount of cooking water, add a generous handful of Parmesan and stir until each pea is coated with a little melted cheese. Add some of the cooking water to loosen the sauce a little; squeeze in some lemon juice and grind over pepper. Eat immediately before it clags together.

These peas are nice - you can taste the cheese and lemon, but they aren't overpowering, more like a gentle flavouring, which is what you want for a side-dish. These would definitely be great for the fussy eater brigade, given the pea's high-ranking position in the fussy eating league tables - but they are also good for those of us with taste buds as well.

Fifteen chocolate tart

2006-11-30T22:44:00.000-08:00

I might as well own up: I don't have a very sweet tooth. This seems to be something of an oddity in the world of people who like food: food blogs tend to include a lot of elaborate sweet concoctions, the like of which I would probably be unable to reproduce anyway. I would love to be able to surprise people with my culinary and artistic flair but I can barely draw in 2 dimensions, let alone produce three-dimensional works of edible art. I am reassured by Jamie's intro to the desserts chapter, where he suggests to the over-ambitious home cook that it is best to start with understanding the basics and not to be too clever. I think that this is particularly true in desserts because you can go to a shop and buy professional desserts - it's nice to see something a bit homely too, the kind of thing you want to eat as well as gaze at. My problem with desserts is mainly that I like the idea of them and not the reality - I am not keen on meringue (and thus pavlova), pannacotta, cheesecakes full of fruit, sticky toffee pudding, Bakewell tart... the list goes on. It isn't that I don't like them - I just can't really be bothered to eat them, as I explained to my brother yesterday. We are engaged in a friendly battle as to which of us is the pickier eater: his dislikes include various vegetables and offal; mine, apart from raw tomatoes, mainly involve desserts, but in fact it's only raw tomatoes that I actually wouldn't eat (and even then I have done...). Conscious that Simon has eaten scallops and mussels as part of this project, I hereby solemnly declare to try all the desserts in this book - who knows? - maybe it will make me a dessert-lover. (This in itself is a bit worrying - I have enough vices already).

I don't need to make myself eat chocolate though - on the contrary. I have already raved about chocolate and I don't need to repeat myself ad nauseum; suffice it to say that there is always chocolate in the house, always dark, and usually Green and Blacks or Cote d'Or. It is unsurprising that Fifteen chocolate tart attracted me immediately when I opened the book. The problem was a) I didnt have a large enough tin and b) OK, I'll admit it -I was scared of making chocolate pastry. I have made pastry before, but I usually make shortcrust; sweet short crust is somewhat scarier already and as for a chocolatey version... Still, I didn't let the tin size deter me - I just used my smaller tin and didn't use all the pastry and made less filling - and I decided to forget the possibility of disaster and just make the tart, no-fuss.

Pastry: to make the pastry, I mixed unsalted butter, sugar and a pinch of salt, then folded in flour, orange zest (this is optional but I love the choc-orange combo and couldn't resist), eggs and cocoa powder, worked it into a dough, wrapped it in cling film and refrigerated it for an hour. I then rolled it out and lined the tin, leaving it in the freezer for half an hour.

While I blind baked the pastry for 12-15 minutes, I made the filling. I brought milk, cream and sugar to the boil, stirring gently, took the mixture off the heat and added broken-up dark chocolate, whisking till smooth, then 2 eggs, and whisked again. I filled the pastry case and baked for 15 minutes, at which point the filling was still a bit wobbly. I obeyed Jamie's instruction not to overcook it and ignored the wobble - it firmed beautifully as it cooled down.

You can see from the above pic that my tart is a bit rustic-looking (home-made, one might say). That is probably because I didn't line the tin particularly fussily - I could have done, but I was in something of a hurry because I needed to make the tart to use the oven for something else. Anyway here is a piece:

I can hardly begin to describe how good this tart is. The orange really comes through in the chocolate pastry and makes it oddly refreshing as well as chocolatey - the pastry is delicious indeed. The filling is a sort of tart version of ganache and thus is unsurprisingly gorgeous. I would say that this tart is pretty rich; Jamie suggests serving it with creme fraiche but I only had natural yoghurt and it was a magic combination. This is an absolutely divine tart and everyone should try it.

Whole baked cauliflower with tomato and olive sauce

2006-11-29T10:47:00.000-08:00

Cauliflower is, according to Jamie, 'an honest, humble, no-frills vegetable'. I would agree with that - cauliflower is a basic sort of vegetable that tends to be forgotten about nowadays in the general rush to serve out of season asparagus, broad beans, and the like. I can't remember the last time I went to someone's house for dinner and was served cauliflower, which is a shame because cauliflower cheese is one of the best comfort foods around and it tastes really good with roasted meat. I will confess that I rediscovered cauliflower last year when we were receiving organic vegetables from a local farm every fortnight, and the bag frequently contained cauliflower and cabbage - vegetables I had hitherto tended to dismiss a bit. I realized that cauliflower is lovely mashed with potato and that it makes for very tasty soup, and I started to make cauliflower cheese, and also to roast florets dusted with cumin in a hot oven (idea courtesy of Nigella). Just recently I loved Jamie's potato and cauliflower dauphinoise. I am, in short, happy to extol the virtues of this humble flowered vegetable.

Jamie's recipe for whole baked cauliflower with tomato and olive sauce intrigued me because the photo makes the dish look quite exciting. Jamie says he made it up; my mother claims to have eaten similar-style dishes in France in the 1990s, although perhaps not with olives. Anyway, to make this, first you find a pan in which the whole head of cauliflower will fit and leave an inch around the sides. The first saucepan I pulled out of the cupboard fitted, which was a good start. Put the pan on the heat, add olive oil and chopped garlic, red onion, the chopped up cauliflower stalk and parsley stalks, and fry for 10 mins or so until softened. Add pitted olives, and sliced anchovy fillets and fry for another couple of minutes before adding tinned plum tomatoes, water, and red wine vinegar and bringing to the boil. Push the cauliflower gently into the middle of the pan; if the pan is the right size, half the cauliflower will be in the sauce and half above it. Drizzle with olive oil, put the lid on the pan, and simmer for 50 minutes. Serve sprinkled with parsley leaves.

My cauliflower was more stressful than the above method might suggest, because I seemed to have bought an inordinately squat cauliflower, so more than half submerged into the liquid. I then began to obsess about the cauliflower sinking into the liquid, but it thankfully didn't - possibly because I kept the heat incredibly low. So low that in future I will simmer the tomato sauce a bit before adding the cauli, so that it begins to thicken and reduce at the start. That said, this was very nice and tasty. You could taste the olives, so olive-haters (who seem to be even more ubiquitous than fennel-haters) should probably miss them out; I'm sure it would still taste okay, though I like the taste of the olives.

I served this with a pork chop that had been rubbed with a dry spice mix that my brother gave me a while ago.

Another yummy dinner! I'd never have thought of cooking cauliflower like that but it is tasty and probably better for you than cauliflower cheese. The vegetables in this book are a real revelation.

Summertime tagliarini

2006-11-28T12:31:00.000-08:00

'Summertime tagliarini': perhaps not the dish you would expect me to make near the end of November. I have noticed that quite a few of the recipes in the book are implicitly summery, less perhaps in name than in the ingredients that they include (broad beans, asparagus, and so on). I confess that I have a bit of a thing about eating seasonally; I am also prepared to admit that this is a relatively recent concern of mine, and more, that until a few years ago I honestly couldn't have told you what was in season when. I was and still am in some ways a child of the supermarket era; I can still think of nothing nicer than a huge French hypermarket, but I probably equally spend more time in Tesco than most and I see a trip to Sainsburys as a treat. Nigel Slater would be horrified; Hugh F-W would punish me with a trip to his farm and the sight of slaughtered animals, and Joanna Blythman would give up on me in disgust. In my defence, I have the same reaction to all shops, with the exception of those tedious DIY places where men can inexplicably loiter interminably, and which don't even have a decent in-store magazine. I like shopping and I hate dirty fields, and people always try and make out that makes me a worse person - as though your morality is directly related to how much time you spend in mud. I would be prepared to accept that supermarkets are evil empires of economic fascism, that they exploit farmers and small producers and damage the environment, and I buy vegetables and meat from a local farm shop but I still go to the supermarket because let's face it everyone does - and because I am a possible shopaholic. I try to make a difference to how I shop though, and one way is refusing to be unseasonal as far as possible, so thus far I haven't decided what to do about the recipes with unseasonal ingredients. Watch this space.

Long preamble over, this recipe had no unseasonal ingredients and could easily be eaten in November (in my opinion). It is basically pasta with pesto, but the pesto is made with parsley rather than basil and is also more textured because only half of the pine nuts are ground up. It is as easy as pesto: smash up half your pinenuts and put in a bowl with parmesan, pecorino, the remainder of the pine nuts, chopped parsley, lemon zest and juice. Season.

Put a large pot of salted water on to boil for the pasta. Sit the sauce bowl on top of the pan while the water heats up to warm the sauce slightly. When the water boils, remove the bowl and add the pasta to the water. Cook as usual, reserving a little cooking water, then toss the pasta with the sauce; if it is too claggy, add some cooking water (I added a bit). Serve with shaved Parmesan and parsley leaves.

This was a nice, clean-tasting dish, which in retrospect is pretty summery, although it was still good in November. I liked the creamy texture of the sauce - I think I will try the old faithful of pasta with basil pesto this way next time. It was an easy weekday meal - easy and tasty, and nice to eat too; not something I would rave about, but I would definitely make it again for a good weeknight supper, and I am determined to try a basil version. I have to say that pasta and pesto usually bores me (I think I overdosed on it at university); I love pesto, but not plain with pasta. This way, with pine nuts whole as well as bashed up into the sauce, is much more interesting to look at as well as eat - and all made with store-cupboard ingredients, so I didn't have to make a special supermarket visit and don't have to feel guilty. Result!

Mad Moroccan lamb

2006-11-27T10:54:00.000-08:00

'Mad Moroccan lamb' is a very intriguing title for a recipe. I love Moroccan lamb tagines, and I liked the idea of making something a bit mad; moreover, shoulder of lamb is right up there in Simon's hit-parade of preferred dishes. I was a bit hesitant about making this dish though, because it seemed somewhat odd - the lamb roasts for two hours in a pretty hot oven and then another hour under a couscous crust. I had a vision of incinerated, blackened lamb waiting to greet me when I opened the oven door, reminiscent of a time I stupidly ordered blackened chicken in one of those naff but ubiquitous pseudo-American bar/restaurants and got something, frankly, burnt. I was torn between worrying that this recipe would fail (by trawling through my library of books and comparing it with other recipes - ultimately a fruitless quest because it seems to be unique) and eager to try it because it looks and sounds so inviting. Greed won out, so yesterday we finally got round to mad Moroccan lamb.
Jamie describes this dish as 'a bit of a palaver' - but worth it. I didn't find it that much of a palaver, because it was easy.
First, I scored the shoulder of lamb in criss-crosses, then ground up cumin, fennel and coriander seeds with black peppercorns, dried chillies and salt, and rubbed the mix into the lamb, before pushing rosemary leaves into the slits and roasting in a conventional roasting tray for 2 hours.
Meanwhile, I fried onions, cinnamon and marjoram or thyme (I used both...) with a pinch of seasoning until softened, before adding chickpeas, water and a surprisingly large quantity of balsamic vinegar (which seems to be another of Jamie's preferred ingredients) and simmering until the sauce thickened, before removing from the heat.
I brought vegetable stock to the boil and added chopped dried fruit (Jamie suggested a range, of which I chose apricots and cranberries) and simmered until the fruit plumped up slightly, before adding olive oil and couscous, removing from the heat and leaving to soak up the liquid. Once the couscous had guzzled all the liquid, I poured it onto a large flat baking tray and drizzled with olive oil.

After 2 hours, I took the lamb out of the oven and turned the oven down from 220 to 200. Or at least that is what I was told to do. I confess that fear of incinerated lamb meant that I had had the oven at 200 anyway - my excuse is an over-exciteable convection oven, the weakness of my excuse being that I had turned the convection option off. Anyway, leaving aside my nervous recipe-breaking, I put the roasting tin on the hob and scraped at the sticky bits on the bottom (in the way you do to make gravy). I found a pot that would snugly fit the lamb inside and spooned an inch or so of couscous onto the base, before spooning over my chickpea mixture. I put the lamb on top, poured over the pan juices, and completely covered with couscous.

Jamie's pic didn't have any noticeable fruit in it but I kept most of the cranberries whole and ensured I scattered some over the top because I liked how it looked - sort of festive. The recipe said to put lemon halves on top but his pic clearly showed slices not halves, and slices looked better, so - more recipe-transgressing - I used slices. I then draped over damp and oiled greaseproof paper and foil and put back in the oven for an hour. Here it is, cooked:

Another anomaly: Jamie refers to the couscous as a crust that can be cracked, and his pic shows the couscous unevenly browned. Mine wasn't browning or hardening so I took off the foil and greaseproof, and then it did brown slightly and hardened a bit, forming a crunchy, rather than crackable, crust.

Jamie doesn't really say how to serve it apart from suggesting you serve it at the table, cracking it open. This would have been a potential disaster for us because our couscous crust came right up to the top of the pan; as we delved in we risked spillage. In the end we served it rustically, tearing off meat and scooping out chickpeas and couscous, before adding a generous dollop of natural yoghurt and drizzling over coriander and chilli.

This might have been my favourite savoury dish so far - I don't know; there has been a lot of competition. But it was truly divine. The couscous, the lamb, the dried fruit, the spices, the yoghurt and coriander, and balsamic-y, cinnamon-y, thyme-y chick peas - it was fantastic. I loved it and so did Simon. We had enough left for lunches for days, which means I had more for lunch today and still loved it. I do suspect that 220 in my oven could have been disastrous; I think lemon slices as Jamie has in his photo, but not in his text, look better than halves; and I think I was right to take off the greaseproof and foil at the end, but I could be completely wrong! What matters is that this is a grade A dinner and (the acid test) it is still making my mouth water now. Hurrah that there is more for lunch tomorrow!

Roasted chicken breast with lemony Bombay potatoes

2006-11-26T06:38:00.000-08:00

A confession: I love chicken. I could probably eat it every day and in my teenage years I did - I insisted on having for lunch on every school day, sandwiches made with those pre-roasted chicken breasts that cost a small fortune at the time in Sainsburys. That stopped when I went to university and realized that I had developed a habit that was much too expensive for my student budget. My chicken obsession has never really gone away but it has been moderated by my growing taste for other foods; I have also become increasingly aware of the horrific conditions in which battery chickens live and have switched to free-range or organic, which necessarily means eating less chicken because it is twice the price. Anyway yesterday we went to York for the day - it was the St Nicholas Fayre, an annual four-day event with food and Christmas gifts on sale around the market square; mulled wine, roasted chestnuts and carol singers. When we arrived, it was less than festive: the rain was pouring down and everyone was sporting an umbrella like a weapon, so that as you advanced slowly through the assembled throngs, you had to beware of having your eye poked out by a passing umbrella spike. Trolley rage has nothing on umbrella rage. The weather, thankfully, cleared up; we managed a nice lunch in Cafe Rouge and a good mooch around the shops. I found a lovely chocolatiers shop and bought some little Christmas presents there, and I found several bookshops as well as a cardigan in Mango and trousers in Next (both black, the cardigan short with pretty buttons, both for work) and then we went to the market and tasted a few cheeses, most of which we ended up buying (and more besides). We walked around most of the day and returned home shattered but happy, eager for a dinner that would be easy but tasty - a sort of TV dinner without the additives. Jamie's roasted chicken breast with lemony Bombay potatoes, made with mainly store-cupboard ingredients, fitted the bill. Jamie included four chicken breast recipes for one person in the book, all one-tray oven-roasted recipes, all easy; I had already made the chicken breast with creamy butternut squash and chilli which was delicious. This dish was slightly more effort as it involved par-boiling potatoes, but it is as easy as can be - a ready meal without the spooky parts. Perfect.

To make it, I peeled and diced some potatoes, brought them to the boil in cold salted water, simmered for a few minutes, drained and allowed to steam in a colander. I put turmeric, lemon zest, ground cumin, chopped coriander, chopped red pepper, and matchsticks of fresh ginger, into a bowl with lemon juice; to the bowl I added skin-on chicken breasts and the potatoes. I tossed the ingredients in the bowl with a splash of olive oil and seasoned, before removing the chicken, putting the potatoes in an oven-proof tray, and topping with lemon slices and chicken (skin up). I drizzled with olive oil and cooked for 25-35 minutes (oven pre-heated to 200).

For a reason that I can't fathom, Jamie's version of this looks orange. In fact, when I first looked at his picture, I thought his potatoes were sweet potatoes or squash, or even carrots, because they look so orange. Mine, as you can see, is decidedly yellow (which is what I would expect from the turmeric...). Anyway the important thing is that ours was delicious, yellow or orange. The potatoes had inhaled the lemon, chilli and spices and had lovely flavour; the chicken was also very tasty from its brief fling with the spices and lemon. All in all, this is a good, easy, homemade version of a ready meal: you can shove it in the oven and do something else, which is just as easy as putting one of those spookily long-lasting readymeals in the oven/microwave. On his recent programme where he welcomed ready-meal junkies to River Cottage, Hugh F-W's scientific analysis of one ready meal found a ground-up beetle inside, which should be enough to put the nation off, but a nosy peek into other people's trollies in Tesco earlier suggests to me that people are still mainlining them. My way of converting them probably would be less extreme (and maybe less effective) than Hugh's, when he had them witness the slaughter of his animals and preparing dead animals from scratch for dinner. I would suggest that people learn to cook their own fast food, their own ready meals - that way you get the best of both worlds: you skip the additives but you still have time to watch The X Factor.

Black angel tagliarini

2006-11-24T10:05:00.000-08:00

Black angel tagliarini sounds - and looks - really beautiful; the photo is as striking as the name. Apparently this dish is so-called because the white scallops look like angels atop the black pasta - Jamie ascribes it to Italian romanticism. I have eaten pasta with squid ink before, once, at university but never since, and I hadn't, until yesterday, made pasta with squid ink (I am not sure if Tesco sells squid ink...). Anyway I went to Carluccios a couple of months ago and brought back two sachets of squid ink with the intention of making black pasta, but we only got round to it yesterday. This is the second recipe in the fresh pasta section; the first was the papperdelle with a ragu of tiny meatballs that I made last month. We got a pasta maker with wedding vouchers and I love it (apart from the first stages of turning the dough into a pasta sheet, when you run it through the machine on its widest setting. It is amazing how quickly the ball of dough is flattened, but our machine wobbles madly at that point and one person has to hold it down tightly. When I am that person, the wobbling tends to be worse). Fresh pasta is so much easier than you could imagine - and fantastically good - and it makes you feel like a proper foodie. If I am honest, it wasn't making the pasta that has stopped me from suggesting this dish sooner - it is Simon's seafood problem. He has always eaten prawns and crab, and fish of all varieties, but until October he positively despised other forms of seafood; in October, thanks to the Jamie project!, he tried and liked mussels. Earlier in the week I tentatively suggested he might try scallops, and to his credit he was pretty keen. I love scallops. When I lived in France, I was sometimes fed coquilles Saint-Jacques, which would probably be my desert-island dinner; I haven't, sadly, eaten that dish for years...

Making the pasta is exactly like making usual egg pasta, only you add squid ink with the eggs. The scallops (which I bought at a fishmonger in town) were halved and scored, seasoned, then fried quickly in extra virgin olive oil, with chopped red chilli, garlic and parsley added after a minute. I put the pasta on to cook, added white wine to the scallops and let it reduce a little before adding butter and reducing further. Finally I tossed the pasta in the pan with the scallops and a squeeze of lemon juice, and served with more chopped parsley. This is a truly beautiful dish to eat as well as to gaze upon - even though before they are cooked, the pasta strands look like a cross between cobwebs and witches' hair! It tastes as good as it looks, and it is very quick and easy to cook (even if you make your own pasta, it still isn't arduous). The flavours are quite simple - chilli, garlic, wine, lemon - and the scallops of course are divine - angelic, one might say... Simon loved this too, which means Jamie has now converted my seafood sceptic husband to scallops as well as mussels. There are more scallop recipes in this book - I really look forward to the next one.

This is a truly beautiful dish to eat as well as to gaze upon - even though before they are cooked, the pasta strands look like a cross between cobwebs and witches' hair! It tastes as good as it looks, and it is very quick and easy to cook (even if you make your own pasta, it still isn't arduous). The flavours are quite simple - chilli, garlic, wine, lemon - and the scallops of course are divine - angelic, one might say... Simon loved this too, which means Jamie has now converted my seafood sceptic husband to scallops as well as mussels. There are more scallop recipes in this book - I really look forward to the next one.

Leftover stew risotto

2006-11-23T13:45:00.000-08:00

I must confess that leftover stew risotto isn't a very appealing title for a recipe - you wouldn't invite people over and offer them leftover stew risotto. Which is a shame, because, I discovered yesterday, leftover stew risotto is a fabulous weeknight dinner. You may remember that on Tuesday, home alone, I made enough risotto base for three meals, using a third, roughly, to turn into mushroom risotto. Last night, we went for a couple of after work drinks with some friends, and even after two glasses of decidedly ropey pub Pinot Grigio, I managed to feign Domestic Goddess status by whipping up the insanely easy stew risotto.

I used leftover meat from Sunday's beef stew (which we've also had for lunch - this stew goes a long way... which can only be a good thing). I heated that up in a pan, added stock and the risotto base, and stirred until the liquid was absorbed, before adding more stock ladleful by ladleful. Finally I turned off the heat on the hob, added butter and Parmesan to the risotto, and let it sit for a minute, before adding thyme and a drizzle of olive oil.

Risotto isn't all that photogenic, I have decided; looking at it, you need to imagine how lovely risotto with its usual wine and Parmesan and onions and celery, plus leftover melt-in-your-mouth meat, really is. I really liked this risotto and you don't need much leftover meat to make it, which is another bonus. Usually I eat leftover stew as... leftover stew! Converting it into a risotto makes it taste like a completely different dinner, a dinner which I could whip up after the two dodgy glasses of wine and some curry and coriander flavour crisps (hello - who invented curry and coriander crisps? don't they sound revolting? scarily, though, they were pretty good...). I wasn't sure how this recipe would work out, but I will certainly be trying it again; it has got to be the best way of eating leftover beef stew ever.

Mushroom risotto

2006-11-22T14:01:00.000-08:00

Mushrooms definitely rank quite highly on my personal vegetable hit parade (which is in a state of constant flux because even when I was picky, I always liked vegetables, and my tastes tend to vary according to the season). This caveat notwithstanding, I have always liked mushrooms a lot, even those rubbery button ones, but particularly the more exciting varieties. Unfortunately Simon, who isn't picky except when it comes to mushrooms and some forms of seafood, doesn't share my penchant for funghi - he will eat mushrooms in other dishes as long as they aren't the star ingredient, but mushroom pasta or mushroom risotto would definitely be off the cards. I knew, then, that I would have to make mushroom risotto on a night when I was home alone, which happened yesterday.

This project has changed how I see risotto. I used until recently to forget about risotto because it seemed like too much effort. Now I see that the labour it requires is effortless: you stir repeatedly, so you can't possibly be required to do anything else, which means that your mind is free to wander. I have discovered that cooking offers a privileged space and time for day-dreaming, and risotto is a perfect example of this. Yesterday I made enough of Jamie's cunning risotto base recipe for three, chilled it in the porch (well away of any potential passing feet, this time) and then extracted a third, which became the basis for Jamie's mushroom risotto recipe.

Mushroom risotto is one of the classic risottos; it needs little preamble from Jamie, let alone from me. Jamie does suggest finding the best mix of mushrooms possible - in my case, I doubt the best I could find was good enough. My search covered the huge local Tesco, M and S, a deli in town and the farm shop, and the best I could find was a mix of oyster and chestnut mushrooms, boosted by dried porcini (hurrah for dried porcini!). My mushrooms were hardly the fresh chanterelles and porcini that Jamie hints at, and thus my risotto could only ever be good, never great. I won't go through the recipe because everyone knows how to make mushroom risotto; added to the mushrooms and basic risotto base here were chopped garlic, thyme, and lemon juice, which all cut through the creaminess of the risotto and gave it added flavour.

The risotto was nice. It wasn't as good as it could have been, had I had a more interesting range of mushrooms, but it was nice. Risotto is a good meal to eat on your own because it is hardly any effort to eat it; it is like baby food, because it comes in a deep bowl and oozes into your mouth. Next time, I am going to scavenge for more exciting mushrooms - but I think I've missed my seasonal window.

Superb sweet and sour squash

2006-11-21T12:44:00.000-08:00

I have already raved about my love for butternut squash. Jamie's preamble to the squash section of the vegetable chapter emphasizes the health benefits of this wonderfully golden vegetable which has it all: folic acid, energy-enhancing carbs, fibre - and, luckily, flavour. There are three squash side dishes in the book and if I haven't got round to them earlier this can only be because I have had too much to choose from. I had half a squash to use up and wanted fish for dinner, so I went for the recipe that Jamie suggested could be eaten with simple fish or meat amongst a myriad of possibilities (on crostini, with salad, with mozzarella...). Just looking at the ingredient list makes it obvious that it has masses of flavour, so I decided to team it with poached smoked fish and curly kale - I promise I am not paid to promote curly kale, I just bought a huge bunch at the farm shop at the weekend, and I like how it keeps its deep green colour!

This squash dish is pretty easy. I heated olive oil in a casserole type pan and added squash, cut into roughly finger-sized pieces, bashed-up coriander seeds and chilli, sliced red onion and water, and simmered with a lid on for about 10 minutes before removing the lid. When the liquid had cooked off, I added salt and pepper, chopped garlic and thyme, and fried slowly until the vegetables turned lightly golden. At this stage I added raisins, parsley stalks and pinenuts, and fried for a minute before adding balsamic and white wine vinegar and a pinch of sugar. I fried for 3 or 4 more minutes while the sugar glazed and the vinegar cooked away, before stirring through some parsley leaves.

I knew I would like this even before I cooked it, because I love all the ingredients (particularly squash and pinenuts). I did, unsurprisingly, like it a lot. The colours are great and it is an interesting dish, with contrasting flavours and textures, that works fantastically well. I made it as a side dish for poached smoked fish, which worked well - check out the colours on the plate - orange and green - fabby. I think this was probably a pretty healthy dinner, all told - poached fish; vegetables with no hint of fat: an easy and tasty way to feel a bit virtuous.

A rather pleasing carrot cake with lime mascarpone icing

2006-11-20T12:54:00.000-08:00

The title of this recipe is a bit odd. 'A rather pleasing carrot cake' sounds more like Delia than Jamie to me! Nonetheless the accompanying picture whets the tastebuds even if the name doesn't (and let's face it - Delia probably does make a mean carrot cake). I have never made carrot cake before, it being yet another of the banned foods in the Picky Years; I admit that since I began to bake (shamefully only in 2001), I have focused mainly on chocolate cakes. In my defence I should say that I don't have a particularly sweet tooth, but I absolutely love dark chocolate. Recently a lovely woman called Lotta sent me some chilli chocolate from Finland; I think it was the nicest chocolate I have ever had. I love all dark chocolate, really, and some milk; I am not so keen on white chocolate unless it comes with frozen berries, and my idea of heaven is a square of 70% cocoa dark chocolate after a lovely dinner. I am digressing, though - I was intending just to justify my poor baking repertoire, not to start lusting after a square of chocolate (not the whole bar. The kinds of chocolate I like only work in moderation). Anyway, carrot cake always sounded a bit too stodgy for me - and frequently was. I hate stodgy cakes; they remind me of school dinners (and I still have nightmares over school dinners), and carrot cake always has that potential.

I had faith in Jamie though, not to provide a recipe for a Carrot Brick, and I have had my eye on this cake for weeks, but circumstances have militated against my making it. I intended to make it for visitors last week but cheesecake always seemed safer. Yesterday, though, liberated from my usual Sunday roast slavery by the easy beef stew, I came home from shopping and set to making the carrot cake. The process was easy - cream butter and soft brown sugar, beat in 5 egg yolks and zest and juice of one orange, before stirring in self raising flour and baking powder, ground almonds, chopped walnuts, cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon, and grated carrots. I used a packet of ready-ground almonds but chopped my own walnuts, just because this seemed practical. I whisked 5 egg whites with a pinch of salt until stiff and folded them into the cake mix; the cake was cooked for about 50 minutes until golden and risen. Here I nearly goofed: my tin was a 23 cm round tin, as opposed to the 22cm square tin suggested; I am a cake-tin ignoramus, but suspect that my tin was of smaller capacity than the proposed tin. My cake, despite my over-excitable convection oven, was not ready in 50 minutes; the cake skewer remained sticky until 65 minutes or so, which of course made me neurotic (it doesn't take much..).

I am happy to report that despite the unexpected delay, the cake came out moist, not burnt. After an hour of cooling, I iced it with the requisite mixture of mascarpone, full-fat cream cheese, icing sugar and zest and juice of two limes.

The cake was delicious - quite dense; possibly too dense for some, but I liked it a lot and it certainly isn't stodgy. I absolutely adored the icing though - lime mascarpone; utterly delicious and moreish. I would call this cake 'a rather pleasing carrot cake with FANTASTIC lime mascarpone icing', because that icing is to die for (I write as one who doesn't like icing sugar much...) ; I could eat it straight off the cake with a spoon. I admit to being a bit obsessed with limes (I always squeeze more lime juice into Thai curries than recommended...) but even so - lime icing; wicked! I am already wondering how it would work on other cakes... Thankfully, this cake makes enough for leftovers several times over; even so, I have to stop myself from doing a Nigella (remember the cringe-inducing yet compelling final scene of all the episodes of Nigella Bites?) and sneaking downstairs at night to lick off the icing.

Melt in your mouth shin stew

2006-11-20T10:43:00.000-08:00

Stew is one of the meals that shows how far I have come since The Picky Years and even since my student days. When I was a student, I wasn't actually that picky, but I lived on bastardized versions of Chinese, Thai and Italian food (aka pasta and stir-fries) and I suppose I despised stew as the sort of food your grandparents would eat, rather than the kind of food an upwardly mobile pseudo-sophisticate might go for. There may well have been a foodie revolution going on, sparked off I would guess by the rise of the gastropub, which made sausage and mash trendy, but I lived in Cambridge and I missed it (Cambridge is rightfully known for greatness in many areas - food is not one of them...). By the time I cottoned on to it, more through reading (and craving!) Nigel Slater's deliciously comforting Real Food than through frequenting the 'in' eating establishments of the time, I was hooked and I haven't looked back. I still love spicy food and I still eat a lot of pasta, but I also eat sausage and mash, lamb shanks (okay, so everyone likes lamb shanks these days, but I really, really like them), slow-cooked, gently warming casseroles, and shepherds pie. Somehow these dishes make the world feel safe; you can lock the doors and close the curtains and shut out the freezing darkness outside, and allow yourself to be comforted, cocooned by the reassuring, honest simplicity of that sort of food. It is this sort of food that makes the cold weather and short days not only bearable, but even in some ways desirable; if it really were 'forever summer', as Nigella put it, we would have to live on salad, and that is enough to make me welcome the autumn.

Jamie's shin stew is a fairly typical beef stew, with the usual ingredients - onion, celery, carrot, garlic, rosemary and bay, plum tomatoes and red wine - with cinnamon and dried porcini. Like all stews, the only effort it requires is chopping the vegetables - otherwise it is as easy as can be. Yesterday we started Christmas shopping, which for me tends to involve prolonged browsing in book shops and cook shops fantasizing about my ideal presents and then trying and failing to imagine what other people might want. I confess that I almost always buy people books; this is probably because that is what I want, and I find it hard to imagine that other people are less keen. I also have to resist the temptation to buy everyone a kitchen gadget that is essential to my life and utterly foreign to theirs. Anyway yesterday I did start Christmas shopping, while the stew simmered gently in the slow cooker (I increased the cooking time and used the slow cooker rather than the oven for convenience), which seemed like a highly productive way to spend a Sunday. I served the stew with mashed sweet potato and steamed curly kale (both from the farm shop).

Mmm. This really is as Jamie says 'fantastic comfort food', easy, simple, but certainly not to be despised or scoffed at. Oh and the best thing about stews is that you make far more than you need so that you can have leftovers when you are feeling down/tired/grumpy, and need a bit of food therapy - by which I mean food that warms you up inside without making you feel guilty afterwards. They should prescribe beef stew on the NHS.

April's rosemary straw potatoes with lemon salt

2006-11-19T02:38:00.000-08:00

In my picky days, I mostly hated burgers. I did eat them, as a teenager, occasionally when I went into Newcastle on Saturdays to shop with my friends. We didn't have much money and lunch was either a big Mac or a sandwich in Oliver's, where you chose your fillings and they made the sandwich up for you as you watched; Oliver's was a hundred times nicer than McDonalds, so we tended to go there, but McDo was much quicker. Anyway I was never keen on burgers - I didn't much like the ubiquitous gherkin, and I wasn't a fan of beef (even the nice kinds, and certainly not the spooky cuts that make it into commercial burgers). I started to eat burgers with enthusiasm in 2004, trying out a variety of home-made burgers with different flavourings - an Asian vibe with coriander and chilli sauce; a cheeseburger with Roquefort; lamb burgers in pitta with hummus and tzatziki... burgers that were a world away from the cardboard commercial version. Yesterday I had a burger craving, and decided to try out Tessa Kiros's hamburger with pink sauce from Apples for Jam, along with Jamie's recipe for rosemary straw potatoes with lemon salt. Jamie's recipe comes from April at the Spotted Pig gastropub in New York, which I googled and found has one of those menus that make you salivate. April serves her rosemary straw potatoes (which she calls shoestring fries) with a blue cheese hamburger, so I felt I was in the right vein in teaming them with Tessa's hamburger with gorgonzola.

For the burger, I mixed good beef mince with chopped parsley and seasonings and moulded into burgers to grill. The burger itself is pretty basic, but Tessa's accompaniments are to die for: red onions fried with thyme and a little salt until sticky and a wonderful pink sauce made with ketchup, mayo, paprika and lemon juice which is exceptionally delicious, as well as tomato slices and gherkins.

Simon made the straw potatoes because he is the designated potato-preparer in this house and because I was watching the X factor. This seemed to involve slicing peeled potatoes into fine matchsticks and patting them dry, before deep frying them; unlike chips, they only need one deep-frying phase because they are so thin. Rosemary sprigs are added in the last 30 seconds or so. Simon also made the accompanying lemon salt by bashing lemon zest and sea salt together.

I can hardly begin to describe how good these fries are. Really crunchy, a sort of cross between chips and crisps, but nicer than either, and the lemon salt is delicious too. These was a massive hit. As you can see in the pic some of the matchsticks are thicker than others and they didn't go as crunchy, but they were still really nice; the thinnest ones were the best chips I've ever eaten, though, and I am not even much of a chip fan! The whole dinner was absolutely perfect, and it is rare that I would say that about burger and chips.

I think the picture sums it up- Saturday night food heaven.

Kylie Kwong's Chinese Feast

2006-11-18T09:22:00.000-08:00

In our house, Friday night is very often Curry Night - it's as though I have a physical need of spicy food to mark the beginning of the weekend; I have no idea why. Often, I cook the curry myself - making curry is incredibly easy - but many curries taste better after sitting for a while or after a spell in some sort of marinade, so ideally I need to be a bit organized and sometimes I frankly am not. Anyway, last week we had an Indian takeaway, trying out a new takeaway that our friends rated very highly - and we were given the wrong curry: a hideously hot chilli masala instead of the medium garlic we had ordered. This week I wanted to cook and decided to make use of my (yes, another) new book, Kylie Kwong's Simple Chinese Cooking, which had come highly recommended.

I decided to make sung choi bao of pork (basically - spiced-up pork mince in lettuce leaves) to start, then chicken and cashew stir-fry with steamed rice. The pork mince was stir-fried with ginger, garlic, red onion, shao hsing wine, soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar and sesame oil, then tossed with julienned carrot and spring onions (I was also meant to use celery and beansprouts but didn't have any of the latter and forgot to include the former).

This was served in iceberg lettuce leaves that had been soaked in cold water, crunchy little boats to hold the spicy filling

I have made various sorts of mince-in-iceberg starters (my favourite being Nigella's Korean beef from Forever Summer) but this one had better texture than previous versions I have tried; the mix of raw and stirfried veg and mince worked really well, and the flavours were good too.

To follow I made a simple chicken and cashew stirfry from the same book - very simple indeed, since it contained only chicken thigh fillet, garlic, shao hsing wine, cashews, cucumber and salt. The chicken was marinaded for 30 minutes in shao hsing wine, cornflour, cold water and sea salt, and then stirfried with the other ingredients, adding chopped spring onion to garnish.

This dish was incredibly disappointing. It wasn't nasty, it was quite nice, but it lacked oomph. I can see why in retrospect: it could have done with some soy or oyster sauce, or some other flavouring as well as the Chinese cooking wine; ginger, for instance, would have helped. It was okay; it just wasn't fantastic, which was a shame after the very tasty pork. I am not going to give up on Kylie, but I think the next dish I try will have more ingredients (beef in oyster sauce looks delicious, as does Mongolian beef and the pork with honey and ginger; the prawn dishes look divine too). Perhaps I should be wary of too-flavoursome starters, that build up expectations in the taste buds of treasures to come, and lead to disappointment when the main course arrives.

Buttered peas with crunchy bacon

2006-11-17T00:00:00.000-08:00

Peas are, apparently, the preferred vegetable of the picky eater brigade. I was reminded of this recently when some colleagues came over for dinner and I asked them if there was anything they wouldn't eat; one of them said no seafood, no fish, no green vegetables (except peas), amongst other things in a list too long to recall here. She seemed to take it for granted that I would understand that peas were an acceptable green vegetable, which I found odd because in my picky-eater days, peas didn't really feature on my food radar. I didn't dislike them as such; I just found them profoundly dull, and I suppose I still do, although now I always keep a bag of frozen peas in the house to add to curries or pasta dishes or, occasionally fishcakes, or as an emergency if the fresh vegetables need to be eked out. The problem, I think, is that frozen peas don't have a lot of taste on their own; they are (to my mind) almost pointless when served with a plain piece of meat or fish, but they go very well indeed with shepherds pie and other dishes with sauce because their sweetness seems to cut through rich sauces.

Jamie has several ideas for serving peas in Cook with Jamie. It is worth pausing to describe his vegetable chapter - I think that it is the best vegetable chapter of any cookery book I've ever bought (I suppose I should except Jane Grigson's Vegetable book, but then the whole book is devoted to vegetables, which is probably cheating). I've noticed a tendency in cookery writers to include an impressive array of meat recipes and fish/seafood recipes, as well as, say, pasta, and a token few incredibly complex layered vegetarian dishes, but to skip vegetable side dishes altogether. Where they do figure, the vegetables seem for some reason to be laden with cream or overpowering sauces, which means that they take over the whole dish and can only be served with the plainest of white fish or chicken fillet. When I entertain, I tend to make curries at least partly because I don't have to mess about steaming some veg, boiling others, roasting others, at the last minute, and so that I don't have to worry about whether steamed broccoli or wilted spinach, like we have on an almost daily basis, are too boring for words. I need a wider side-vegetable repertoire, and Cook with Jamie offers just that.

I have already tried the rosemary roasted potatoes; the braised white cabbage with bacon; the broccoli with soy and ginger; dinner lady carrots; Savoy cabbage with Worcestershire sauce (and maybe more). Yesterday I had decided we needed to eat fish, so we had hake fillets dusted in seasoned flour and fried, with carrot puree (I love any sort of mashed root veg, and carrots, sweet potatoes and squash have such fabulous colour) and with one of Jamie's pea recipes: buttered peas with crunchy bacon. These are simplicity itself: cook the peas in boiling water for 3-4 minutes until tender. Meanwhile, fry thinly sliced rashers of smoked streaky bacon (I admit I used pancetta...) until golden and crisp, then remove to a dish and keep the pan with its bacony juices. Drain the peas, reserving a little of their cooking water, and add them to the pan that the bacon was cooked in, with a knob of butter, a squeeze of lemon juice and some seasoning; add a glug of cooking water to coat the peas. Serve with the bacon bits scattered over.

These peas were absolutely delicious - I could have eaten a huge bowl of them for dinner on their own! They didn't overpower the hake; instead, they added flavour and oomph to the whole dinner. Jamie suggests that as well as a side dish, they could be added to pasta dishes or risottos - the thought makes my mouth water. Like the broccoli with soy and ginger, this take on a humble vegetable (and a frozen vegetable here, to boot) is fantastically tasty and simple; it could even become addictive.

Squash, sage and amaretti risotto

2006-11-16T10:49:00.000-08:00

I love butternut squash. To me, it is up there with aubergine and asparagus; it is obviously much less sexy than either of those, but it has a gentle warmth that makes it a delight to cook with - not to mention its beautiful colour and smooth flesh. I decided to make this risotto because I had mascarpone that needed using up and because I wanted an excuse to eat squash; it had rained all day and risotto seems perfect for a dark, wet November evening.

Making the risotto was easy - I don't know why I had it in my head before embarking on this project that there was anything tiresome about making it. Stirring is quite therapeutic; it gives you time to think, while you watch the grains of rice plump up and soften. While I made the standard base risotto recipe, I pounded cinnamon and dried chilli with salt and rubbed two quarters of a butternut squash (unpeeled) with olive oil, before smearing over the cinnamon and chilli mix, and roasting for 45 minutes at 200C.

Once the base risotto was made, I tried Jamie's cunning trick of spreading it over an oiled baking tray and putting it in the porch to cool down (that was nearly a disaster as I put it on the floor, assuming noone would go out there, but Simon did go out there when a pushy Talk Talk salesman rang the bell; luckily he didn't step in my risotto). Meanwhile I had some me-time - not that long, but enough time to make a difference. When I was hungry, I returned the risotto to a pan with half the remaining stock required and the squash flesh, brought it to the boil, and simmered, adding more stock gradually in the usual risotto-making way. When the rice was cooked, I turned off the heat, beat in mascarpone, butter and Parmesan, seasoned slightly, and put the lid on the pan for a minute or two while I fried sage leaves in olive oil until crispy.

The risotto was served topped with the sage leaves; I put Parmesan and crushed amaretti biscuits on the table for each of us to add as we wished.

The photo, above, doesn't do it justice; this was delicious. The amaretti biscuits added a lovely sweetish contrast; too many of those would have ruined the dish, though. Jamie suggests adding roasted chestnuts or pancetta near Christmas, which seems to me like a good excuse to make this again. Simon had read the recipe and asked if we were having the version with a twist; I said no, and clocked his disappointment. He didn't seem disappointed when he ate it though! I have to say that risotto, the meal I never remembered to make, is definitely going to become a weeknight regular in this house. I will have to take tips from Ilana's 'I love risotto' blog... There are 6 remaining risotto recipes in Cook with Jamie - I look forward to more risotto!

Macaroni cheese

2006-11-15T12:58:00.000-08:00

I suspect that macaroni cheese was one of the dishes that made me hide behind the settee when I was a little girl refusing to go to school on account of the vomit-inducing meals. In retrospect the dinners themselves may have been okay - I was horribly picky - but they were semi force-fed and (as far as I recall) dripping in watery grease. I could, of course, be projecting erroneously here - I will admit that my school dinners were probably way better than the dinners we saw on Jamie's programme (turkey twizzlers...). Nonetheless, they instilled in me hatred of certain foods that it has taken me years to combat - milk (it always had a skin); rice pudding (ditto); suet (not sure why); watery mash. I am convinced that stodgy macaroni cheese, clagged up with bechamel, was on our school menu; I can almost remember trying to tip it off my plate before a scary dinner nanny force-fed it to me. It returned to haunt me at university, again in its most stodgy form (and served with chips, would you believe) but at least there we had a choice (which could be delicious but was mainly vile food under pretentious pseudonyms - imagine florets verts et blancs, which was actually cauliflower and broccoli cheese...). Since then I have never, ever, ordered macaroni cheese out of the house but I have eaten it, thanks to one of Jamie's 'quickies' in Delicious magazine a couple of years ago. That version had butternut squash in it and was topped with rosemary breadcrumbs and pancetta - dolled-up macaroni cheese with a real kick! I really liked it but somewhere along the line I seem to have forgotten about it - that happens with recipes; I go through phases of cooking certain dishes and then forget they exist.

The macaroni cheese in Cook with Jamie attracted me because the photo bore no discernable resemblance to the stodgy macaroni that my primary school served up (or to the university's adult equivalent). This is mainly because Jamie doesn't make bechamel; instead, the pasta is cooked until almost al dente and tossed with a mixture of mascarpone, parmesan, and fontina/taleggio (taleggio seems to be easier to find round here), herb butter (made by frying marjoram or oregano in foaming butter) and some of the pasta cooking water to loosen. The pasta mixture is then baked in the oven in an earthenware dish, topped with extra grated Parmesan, nutmeg and mozzarella, before being whacked under a hot grill to brown up the top.

This macaroni is very nice. Not at all stodgy, just silkily cheesey; an easy, comforting sort of a dish. There are no strong flavours here, nothing to object to, just a gentle pasta supper with no pretensions (and no bechamel).

This is the kind of food you eat curled up on a sofa, rather than sitting up at a table, when you don't want uplifting and inspiring conversation; you just want to relax. It is I think, a gently warming, relaxing, definitely easy dinner.