Fifteen Christmas Salad, Perfectly Cooked Crispy Duck, Asian style

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!

The best roast turkey

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...

Roasted chicken breast with cherry tomatoes and asparagus

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.

Roasted chicken breast wrapped in pancetta with leeks and thyme

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.

Roasted chicken breast with lemony Bombay potatoes

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.

Poussins agro-dolce

The title of this recipe sounds much better in Italian than in English: sweet and sour poussin sounds unpleasantly close to sweet and sour chicken, that vile battered aberration with the sickly, MSG-laden virulently red sauce in Chinese takeaways across the country. That said, Gordon Ramsay has a lovely sweet and sour poussin recipe: the poussin is roasted and served with a sauce made from red peppers and vinaigrette and served over tagliatelle. It is stunningly easy and remarkably tasty and most surprisingly, it pre-dates Gordon's attempts to reach out to the common cook, featuring in one of his earlier recipe collections. Jamie's recipe for pot-roasted poussin is quite different - in Jamie's words it is 'comforting, deep and dark'. Just the thing for a November Sunday evening, a twist on the traditional roast but with losing none of its trademark comfort.

Firstly, I stuffed each poussin with an orange quarter, half a cinnamon stick and a sprig of rosemary, before browning them lightly for 10 minutes or so on the hob and removing them to rest on a plate.

To make the sauce, I fried chopped onion, celery and rosemary in the pan that the poussins had been in until soft. Meanwhile, I blitzed sun dried tomatoes with Chianti in the Magimix. I returned the poussins to the pan, turning up the heat and adding vinegar and sultanas plus the mixture of tomato and red wine. After reducing the sauce slightly, I covered the pan and tranferred it to a preheated (200 C) oven to pot-roast for 30 minutes. At this stage I removed the lid, turned the poussins breast-side up and scattered them with pine nuts, before draping over strips of pancetta. I had used a pan that was border-line too small (it fitted the birds very, very snugly, almost too snugly) so I couldn't arrange my pancetta with much artistic dexterity - never mind! I returned the pan to the oven for another 10 minutes, lid off, until the pancetta had turned golden and crispy.

You can see from the picture how close my two poussins got in the pan. In retrospect I should perhaps have used a larger pan, but my larger pans are laughably larger and the little birds would have been lost inside the space. You can almost see the deep red sauce that the poussins are sitting in, which is utterly delicious.

I served this dish with olive oil mash, another recipe from the book that I have previously made with steak - mash with olive oil and Parmesan which is as yummy as it sounds.

The picture above was taken before I poured over the deliciously tomatoey, red winey sauce, and before we tucked hungrily in! This is the sort of dinner that warms you from the inside out, that you should eat with the wind howling outside and a log fire in the hearth (we don't have a fire, and it wasn't even that cold, but it didn't matter; the dish created that kind of atmosphere). Since someone is bound to ask me to compare this recipe with Gordon's (probably my sister-in-law, who is a bit of a Gordon fan secretly), here goes: Jamie's is a sultry, mysterious sort of dish, whereas Gordon's is brightly showy; Jamie's is winter and Gordon's is summer. I have to say though that the poussin itself has more depth of flavour in Jamie's recipe - you can really taste the orange, cinnamon, wine, vinegar and tomatoes, not all at the same time, but fleetingly, intriguingly. I really liked how this dish came together - it just seemed to work, perfectly and utterly satisfyingly. Comfort food with a touch of mystery - what more could anyone ask for?

Perfectly cooked crispy duck with spicy plum chutney

Crispy duck with pancakes and hoisin sauce has to be one of the best treats in a Chinese restaurant. Apart from in Chinese restaurants, I have seldom eaten duck - I remember a decidedly iffy duck a l'orange in France and that is about all. I did make a homemade version of duck with hoisin in the summer, following a recipe from Alistair Hendy's Home Cook, which involved braising the duck gently in a potent brew of soy, ginger, rice wine and star anise, amongst other ingredients, before roasting the bird to crisp up the skin. It was delicious. I had intended to make it again, but the three-fold process of braising, draining and roasting has seemed like a lot of effort in cooking terms ever since, not because I am a lazy cook but because the recipe required planning ahead.

Jamie's crispy duck doesn't really need much forward-planning, which is good because we were out most of the weekend and didn't have time to spend in the kitchen. I rubbed the duck with sage salt (obtained by bashing sage and salt together...) and stuffed it with more sage leaves and two halves of an orange, before sitting it on top a bed of the usual vegetables (carrot, garlic, onion, celery...) and roasting it. Meanwhile I made the plum chutney - a delectable mix of plums, sugar, water, cinnamon, star anise, orange zest, ground cumin.

The duck was served with the plum chutney and watercress (I've noticed that Jamie uses a lot of watercress. Is watercress the new rocket? or the new sundried tomato?). I know I've used a lot of superlatives during this project but I can't help myself: the duck was good, but the plum chutney was heavenly. We ate leftover duck and chutney in our sandwiches today but happily there is more chutney left. Some chutneys are too sweet; this one is absolutely perfect.. and the duck was very tasty too. Jamie suggests an alternative to the sage salt - that is, rubbing the duck with five spice and sticking a lump of ginger into its cavity. I suspect I will feel the need to try this alternative, if only as an excuse for more duck and more chutney...

Roasted chicken breast with creamy butternut squash and chilli

Last night, Simon went out to a gig so I was home alone. I say this not to invite sympathy, because being home alone occasionally has its merits. You can eat when you feel like it. You can linger in a too-hot bath with a bath bomb and a good novel, and not worry about what time dinner will be. And you can watch repeated re-runs of Trinny and Susannah from the days when their advice really counted without irritating anyone. But it does mean you don't feel like doing a proper roast just for you - and all the same you don't want to make Sunday night even more miserable by eating a meagre sandwich. So. Jamie's dinners for one to the rescue! I have seen him leave one-person oven-cook dinners for Jools on old episodes of the Naked Chef, in foil parcels, and been torn between thinking 'ooh how sweet' and 'ugh why doesn't she learn how to cook?' But it has to be said that this sort of arrangement is useful when making dinner for 2 people eating at different times, as we were (Simon ate before he set off ridiculously early to his gig; I like to centre my evening around dinner so wanted to wait), and there are four incredibly easy roasted chicken breast recipes for one in Cook with Jamie. Of which I picked the one that appealed first: chicken breast with creamy butternut squash and chilli.

The recipe was very simple: toss half a deseeded red chilli with the picked leaves from a couple of sprigs of marjoram, a chicken breast (skin on) and a pinch of salt and pepper. Place the chicken breast and flavourings into a small baking dish or tinfoil tray, with very fine slices of butternut squash. Drizzle double cream over the squash and season the whole dish with grated nutmeg and salyt and pepper, before drizzling with olive oil and cooking for 25-35 minutes in a preheated oven.

The result is very good: deliciously creamy slices of squash, crispy chicken skin and tender breast meat, all infused with the chilli and marjoram. Very nice indeed - a sort of TV supper, a home-made equivalent of a ready meal, a pizza or a takeaway with none of the preservatives, additives or other spooky stuff, and bags more flavour. There are three more roasted chicken breast recipes- I am looking forward to trying them for another home-made TV dinner evening...