Nigel Slater is the author of a collection of bestselling books and presenter of BBC I’s Simple Cooking. He has been food columnist for the Observer for twenty years. His books include the classics Appetite and The Kitchen Diaries and the critically acclaimed two-volume Tender. His award-winning memoir Toast – the story of a boy’s hunger won six major awards and is now a BBC film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Freddie Highmore. His writing has won the National Book Award, the Glenfiddich Trophy, the André Simon Memorial Prize and the British Biography of the Year. He was the winner of a Guild of Food Writers’ Award for his BBC I series Simple Suppers.

Also by Nigel Slater

Tender Volumes I and II

Eating for England

The Kitchen Diaries

Toast – the story of a boy’s hunger

Thirst

Appetite

Nigel Slater’s Real Food

Real Cooking

The 30-Minute Cook

Real Fast Food

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

A few notes on television

A few words of introduction

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

List of recipes by month

Just one more…

Copyright

About the Publisher

For James Thompson

Acknowledgements

Thank you, as always, to Louise Haines, my editor for over twenty years, for your endless encouragement, guidance and patience. Without you there would be no book.

To Jonathan Lovekin for taking beautiful pictures of so much I have cooked over the years. Thanks, Jonnie. I am grateful to Harry Borden for kindly allowing my publishers to use his thoughtful portrait of me.

To James Thompson, producer, kitchen genius and confidant. He who holds it all together. James, thank you for everything, but especially for your sure hand with the recipes, guiding their journey from diary to table, published page and television screen. For your inspiration, enthusiasm, hard work and friendship, I can never thank you enough.

To my literary agent Araminta Whitley and my television agent Rosemary Scoular, to Harry Mann, Sophie Hughes, Wendy Millyard and everyone at LAW, United Agents, Breckman and Company and Mishcon de Reya for dealing with all the really important stuff that I don’t understand.

To everyone at Fourth Estate, especially Victoria Barnsley, Michelle Kane, Georgia Mason and Olly Rowse. To David Pearson for helping to make this second volume of the diaries so beautiful and, as always, my thanks to Jane Middleton and Annie Lee for their eagle eyes and endless patience.

To everyone at the Observer, especially the wonderful Allan Jenkins, Ruaridh Nicoll, Martin Love, Gareth Grundy and John Mulholland. To Leah, Debbie, Helen and Caroline. And to Sarah Randell and Helena Lang. Thank you for your continued support.

To William, Sean and Mark and everyone at Fullers for all your hard work on the kitchen and to Steve Owens and everyone at Benchmark.

To Katie Findlay for helping to keep the garden in great shape; to Rob Watson at Ph9 for looking after www.nigelslater.com; to Dalton Wong and everyone at twentytwotraining for their endless encouragement and support and to Tim and Asako d’Offay and Takahiro Yagi for their wisdom and kindness.

And thank you to all the bookshops and those who work in them for their continued enthusiasm. And to everyone who enters their local booksellers and discovers the magic that lies on those creaking shelves and gets to know that there is nothing so beautiful as the feel and smell of a book in the hand.

A few notes on television

I had no real intention to present a television series. I had enough on my plate with a long-running weekly newspaper column and my books, and, however much I enjoy watching ‘celebrity chefs’, had no wish to be part of that world. The idea of filming a cookery series was suggested to me by Jay Hunt, at the time controller of BBCI. She gently persuaded me that there was room for a series with calm and gentle presentation and understated and simple food.

Not only did the series turn out to be a success beyond our wildest dreams, I ended up rather enjoying myself, and as a result there have now been four of the ‘Simple’ series. I owe a huge debt to Jay and to Ian Blandford, to Alison Kirkham and Tom Edwards and of course to Danny Cohen. To the production team and everyone at BBC Bristol, especially Pete Lawrence, Simon Knight, Jen Fazey, Michelle Crowley, James Thompson and Gary Skipton. And to my awesome crew who have made the shows what they are: Richard Hill, Sarah Myland, Robbie Johnson, Conor Connolly, Cheryl Martin, Simon Kerfoot, Sheree Jewell, Sam Jones and Archie Thomas. And thank you to Rudi Thackeray and his team. A big shout out also to the guys at Kiss My Pixel and to Mark Adderley and Nadia Sawalha. Thank you all.

This book is not a traditional television ‘tie-in’ but versions of many of the recipes in Simple Suppers and Simple Cooking can be found between these pages. (Others are in The Kitchen Diaries volume I and Tender Volumes I and II.) Thank you to the millions of you who watch each programme, and send such heartwarming letters, emails and tweets. I cannot tell you how much the entire team appreciates it.

And to that vibrant, warm and encouraging community at Twitter @realnigelslater. You are a joy.

Nigel Slater, London, September 2012

www.nigelslater.com

Twitter @realnigelslater

www.4thestate.com

A few words of introduction

I cook. I have done so pretty much every day of my life since I was a teenager. Nothing flash or showstopping, just straightforward, everyday stuff. The kind of food you might like to come home to after a busy day. A few weekend recipes, some cakes and baking for fun, the odd pot of preserves or a feast for a celebration. But generally, just simple, understated food, something to be shared rather than looked at in wonder and awe.

Sharing recipes. It is what I do. A small thing, but something I have done for a while now. As a cookery writer, I find there is nothing so encouraging as the sight of one of my books, or one of my columns torn from the newspaper, that has quite clearly been used to cook from. A telltale splatter of olive oil, a swoosh of roasting juices, or a starburst of squashed berries on a page suddenly gives a point to what I do. Those splodges, along with kind emails, letters and tweets, give me a reason to continue doing what I have been doing for the past quarter of a century. Sharing ideas, tips, stories, observations. Or, to put it another way, having a conversation with others who like to eat.

That is why, I suppose, each book feels like a chat with another cook, albeit one-sided (though not as one-sided as you might imagine). It is a simple premise. I make something to eat, everyone, including myself, has a good time, so I decide to share the recipe. To pass on that idea, and with it, hopefully, a good time, to others. For twenty years I have shared many of those ideas each week in my column in the Observer and in my books. They might also come dressed up a little nowadays, in the form of the television series, but it is still the same basic premise.

The diaries

For years now I have kept notebooks, with scribbled shopping lists and early drafts of recipes in them. These are not, I hasten to add, a set of exquisitely bound Kitchen Chronicles, but a scruffy hotchpotch, a salmagundi, of anything and everything I need to remember, from shopping lists and baking temperatures to whether it was two or three eggs that went into the cake. The books also contain the endless lists that I have written, almost obsessively, since childhood.

The notes, sometimes carefully annotated, sometimes not, vary from neat essays in longhand in black fountain pen to a series of almost illegible scribbles on any bit of paper that was handy at the time. The notebooks have recently been replaced, unromantically, by notes typed on an iPad. A decision I now rather regret. These notes form the basis of this second volume of The Kitchen Diaries. More than a diary, this is a collection of small kitchen celebrations, be it a casual, beer-fuelled supper of warm flatbreads with pieces of grilled lamb scattered with toasted pine kernels and bloodred pomegranate seeds or a quiet moment contemplating a bowl of soup and a loaf of bread. We can either treat food as nothing more than fuel or relish its every quality. We can think of preparing it as something to get done as quickly and effortlessly as possible or as something to find pleasure in, something to enrich our everyday life, to have fun with.

I have always written about the minute details of cookery, the small pleasures that can make it enjoyable and worth our time. (The bigger picture, the science and politics of food, its nutrition, provenance and chemistry, I leave to others who can do it better.) What intrigues me about making something to eat is the intimate details, the small, human moments that make cooking interesting. Whilst I never forget that most cooking is about getting something on the table at the end of a working day, I see no reason why it can’t be something to celebrate. The craft of making something with our hands, something for ourselves and others.

Between the pages of this book there are those days, hours and moments spent in the kitchen that I enjoyed enough to make notes about. The dish of quinces baking in the oven on a winter’s day; a hastily assembled salad of chicken, fresh peas and their new shoots; a bowl of brilliant-orange sweet potato soup for a frosty evening; a steak tossed with chilli sauce and Chinese greens; little cakes of crab and fresh coriander to eat with a friend, straight from the frying pan. It is also a collection of jottings about kitchen kit, a shout-out to the pieces of equipment that have become old friends: the favourite knife for peeling vegetables, the wooden spatula or spoon that feels more comfortable in the hand than any other. The bits and pieces we gather together over the years for our kitchen tasks that have become a pleasure to use. Their place in my life, like the most comfortable trainers that have seen better days, or the pullover with holes in it that you can’t bear to get rid of, is something I felt needed celebrating. These small pieces of equipment are part of my kitchen life.

The recipes

I am not a chef and never have been. I am a home cook who writes about food. Not even a passionate cook (whatever one of those is), just a quietly enthusiastic and slightly greedy one. But, I like to think, a thoughtful one. Someone who cares about what they feed themselves and others, where the ingredients come from, when and why they are at their best, and how to use them to give everyone, including the cook, the most pleasure. Whilst a bit of cookery is simply magic (some of the food being produced by professional chefs at the moment is extraordinary, exciting and wonderful), most of it is essentially craft, a subject that holds great interest for me. The art of crafting something by hand – a sandwich even – for others to enjoy is something I can always find time for. Making a dish over and over again till it is how you want it, whether a loaf of bread or a pasta supper for friends, gives me a great deal of pleasure. As does making an economical one-off dish from the ‘bits in the fridge’.

I’m neither slapdash nor particularly pedantic in the kitchen (I haven’t much time for uptight foodies; they seem to have so little fun). Neither am I someone who tries to dictate how something should be done, and I am never happier than when a reader simply uses my recipe as an inspiration for their own. If we follow a recipe word for word we don’t really learn anything, we just end up with a finished dish. Fine, if that’s all you want. Does it really matter how you get somewhere? I don’t think it does. Short cuts are fine, rule breaking is fine. What matters is that the food we end up with is lick-the-plate delicious.

I have never held the idea that a recipe should merely be a set of instructions (if that is what you want, there is plenty of it out there). I want more. The cookbooks dearest to me are those where the author has been more generous, adding notes and observations from their own kitchen. I like more than just an author’s fingerprint on a recipe.

What can be of particular value is when a previous reader’s notes come alongside those of the author. In a secondhand bookshop opposite Kew Gardens, I once came across a baking book by a well-known cookery writer. There were notes pencilled in the margin, alterations and occasional exclamation marks. A chocolate cake got three stars, the author’s ‘Moist Fruit Cake’ had the terse note, ‘No it isn’t’, scribbled across it.

Encouraging as it is when I find a well-used copy of one of my books in the kitchen, I am just as happy when readers tell me my book spends as much time on the bedside table. (‘There are three of us in this marriage, Nigel,’ is a sentiment I have heard more than once.) A good cookbook should be a good read, too. And that is what I hope this book will be to you. Recipes, yes, but also a collection of notes, suggestions and tips (though never, ever instructions or diktats) that I would like to pass on to others. All I want to do is share a good time through the medium of a recipe.

Let us never forget that we are only making something to eat. And yet, it can be so much more than that too. So very much more.

A note on the chronology

The first volume of The Kitchen Diaries was a chronological record of what I had cooked and eaten over the course of a single year. This second volume is slightly different in that it is compiled from a collection of my notes taken over several years, so a piece dated June 3 or November 5 could be from one of two or even three years.

The specific dates are relevant because they give a clear and essential link between what I cook and the seasons, a way of eating that has long been dear to my heart, but also because of the structure they bring to the disparate and somewhat chaotic form in which the jottings in my kitchen diaries tend to appear.

January

JANUARY 1
A humble loaf and a soup of roots

The mistletoe – magical, pagan, sacred to Norsemen and the Druids – is still hanging over the low doorway to the kitchen. Part of the bough I dragged back from the market the Sunday before Christmas, my hands numb from the cold. Its leaves are dull now, the last few golden-white berries scattered over the stone floor. Like the holly in the hearth, its presence was a peace offering to the new kitchen that still awaits its work surface, cupboards, sink, taps.

There is an English mistletoe fair at the market in Tenbury Wells each Saturday throughout December. Vast, cloud-like bunches are cut from local cider-apple orchards and sold along with holly and skeins of ivy. Mine came from an oak tree in Hereford, though nowadays much of the folklore-laden evergreen arrives by less-than-romantic truck from northern France. It is only the mistletoe grown on oak that is imbued with magical powers.

Empty glasses are scattered around the room, perched on shelves and window ledges from where we toasted the new, albeit unfinished kitchen. And there is just enough Champagne left in a bottle in the fridge for me to celebrate, in secret, the first morning of the New Year.

This January 1st is no different from all the others, in that I will make soup and a loaf in what is now an annual ritual. Kneading is a good way to start the year. Tactile, peaceful, creative, there is something grounding about baking a loaf on New Year’s Day. We have baked bread since the New Stone Age.

There has been a decade of New Year’s loaves in this house: a simple white bun, its surface softened with a bloom of flour; a dimpled foccacia that left our fingers damp with olive oil; a less than successful baguette, as thin as a wand; a brown, seeded loaf we ate for days like fruit cake; a flatbread; a crispbread; and once a craggy cottage loaf, its top slid to one side like a drunk in a top hat. I forget the others.

This year’s bread is the simplest of them all, a single, hand-worked loaf of strong white flour and spelt – the ancient cousin of wheat that is currently enjoying a renaissance. (This is less considered than it sounds: they are simply the flours I happen to have left in the cupboard after making mince pies.) Modern spelt is a hybrid of the emmer wheat and goat grass grown since the Iron Age, and has found favour with those who consider modern, commercial wheat heavy on the gut. I like it for the faintly nutty quality it brings to the party.

Making a loaf is cooking at its most basic – a bag of flour and a pinch of salt, some warm water and something to make it rise (baking powder, yeast, a home-made leaven). Yet there is more to it than that. There is something therapeutic about kneading live, warm dough. We do it in order to make the dough softer and more elastic, but the feel of dough in the hand makes you consider yourself a craftsman of some sort, which of course you are. I often knead my bread dough every twenty minutes or so, rather than the customary twice. Each kneading only lasts for about a minute. I do it gently too, without bumping or slapping. I am not sure any good can come from treating our food like a punch-bag.

I will attempt to achieve the yeasty sourness I want by using a glass of cider in place of some of the usual water and will get the crust crisp by punching the oven up to almost its highest setting. I want a crackling crust that shatters over the table when you break it, and a soft wholemeal crumb within. A good plain loaf that smells slightly sour and faintly lactic, yeasty, with a subtle fruitiness to it – a quiet and humble loaf with which to start a new year.

A cider loaf

Makes one medium-sized round loaf that will keep for two days and is still good for toast after four.

wholemeal spelt flour: 250g

strong white bread flour: 250g

sea salt: a lightly heaped teaspoon

whole milk: 150ml

honey: a teaspoon

fresh yeast: 35g

dry cider: 250ml

Warm a large, wide mixing bowl (I pour in water from the kettle or hot tap, leave for a minute, then drain and dry). Weigh the flours into the bowl – there is no point in sifting – then stir in the salt. Warm the milk in a small saucepan. It should be no hotter than your little finger can stand. Stir in the honey until it dissolves. Cream the yeast with a teaspoon in a small bowl, slowly pouring in the warm milk and honey. When it is smooth and latte coloured, pour it on to the flours together with the cider and mix thoroughly. I use my hands, though the mixture can be sticky at this point, but a wooden spoon will work too. When the dough has formed a rough ball, tip it out on to a lightly oiled or floured surface. Knead gently for one minute by firmly but tenderly pushing and stretching the dough with the heel of your hand, turning it round and repeating. Lightly flour the bowl you mixed the dough in and place the kneaded dough in it. Cover with a clean, preferably warm cloth and leave in a warm, draught-free place for an hour. Close proximity to a radiator will do, though not actually on it, as will the back of an Aga, a shelf in the airing cupboard or indeed anywhere the yeast can work.

Remove the dough, scraping off any that has stuck to the bowl, and knead lightly for one minute. Return to the bowl, cover and replace in the warm for twenty-five to thirty minutes, until the dough has risen once again.

Set the oven at 240°C/Gas 9. Knead the dough once more, this time forming it into a ball, then place it on a floured baking sheet and dust it generously with flour. Cover with a cloth and keep warm for a further fifteen to twenty minutes.

Put the dough in the oven and bake for twenty-five minutes. If it is nut-brown and crisp, remove it from the oven, turn it upside down and tap the bottom. Does it sound hollow, like banging a drum? Then it is cooked. Cool on a wire rack.

A soup of bacon and celeriac

Celeriac has long been part of the European kitchen, most notably in celeriac remoulade – a classic accompaniment to thinly sliced meats (a few slivers of air-dried ham, a couple of gherkins and a mound of mustardy remoulade is often a winter lunch in our house). The knobbly, ivory root has taken longer to find friends in this country, and we still have no classic British recipe that exploits its clean, mineral qualities. I use it for cold-weather soups, setting it up with bacon, mustard and either thyme or rosemary. The result is deceptively creamy.

medium onions: 2

butter: a thick slice, about 25g

smoked bacon: 120g

celeriac: 800g (1 large root)

thyme: the leaves from 3 small sprigs

chicken or vegetable stock: 500ml

water: 1 litre

grain mustard: 4 teaspoons

parsley: a small bunch

Peel the onions and roughly chop them. Melt the butter in a large, heavy-based saucepan and add the onions. Let them cook for ten to fifteen minutes or so, till translucent. As they cook, cut the bacon into short strips or dice and add them to the pan. Leave over a moderate heat, stirring occasionally, till the bacon fat is pale gold and the onions are soft.

While the onions and bacon are cooking, peel and coarsely grate the celeriac. Stir it into the onions, add the thyme leaves and a little salt, then pour in the stock and water. Bring to the boil, lower the heat and cover with a lid. Leave to simmer for thirty minutes, then stir in the mustard. Chop the parsley and add it to the soup with a seasoning of salt and black pepper. Simmer for five minutes, then remove from the heat.

Remove half the soup and blitz in a blender or food processor till almost smooth. You may need to do this in several batches, so as not to overfill the blender jug. Return the liquidised soup to the remaining soup in the saucepan. You will probably find the result is creamy enough, but if you wish to add some cream, then this is the point at which to do it. Check the seasoning and serve.

Enough for 6

JANUARY 2
A bunch of parsley

Few herbs have much to offer in winter, save bay. Even that is more aromatic when it is dried. They need the heat of the sun to concentrate the aromatic oils that lurk in their leaves and, sometimes, their stems. Parsley, though, has plenty of flavour even in the dead of winter, unless it has frozen in the ground. Parsley heals (John Gerard, the sixteenth-century herbalist, used it to quell stomach complaints) and has a high vitamin C content. Where basil stirs the senses, parsley brings us back to earth.

There is much talk about parsley stems and where they are useful. I don’t mind them in a leaf salad if they are fine and young, no thicker than a needle, but I don’t include them in ‘chopped parsley’, rough or otherwise. The stem occasionally carries an inherent bitterness and can be string-like too. Fastidiously stripping the leaves from their stems is something worth doing.

The stalks add a pleasing mineral quality to stock and soup (they possess a long tap root, like horseradish, that can stretch a foot or more into the earth) but you might prefer to add them towards the end of cooking, otherwise they will introduce a cabbagy note. Twenty minutes is time enough.

Wasted in its usual role as a garnish, if not downright pointless, this biennial, slow-germinating herb prefers rich soil, ideally slightly alkaline. Liking a little shade and winter shelter, it does well in my dampest bed, under the medlar tree. You can grow it from seed if you have the patience. I ‘rescue’ large pots of it from the supermarket and plant it in the garden just as others rescue battery hens.

There is little of interest in the cupboards and the fridge is as bare as I have seen it. But there is a granite-like lump of Parmesan in an airtight box in the fridge, a packet of rice in the cupboard and therefore the possibility of risotto. Parsley makes a surprisingly luxurious addition to rice as long as you are generous with the butter and cheese.

A parsley risotto with Parmesan crisps

Timing wise, you can manage to give the risotto its last ladle of stock, then start on the crisps. They will stay warm and crisp(ish) for long enough.

flat-leaf parsley: a good 50g

hot stock (chicken, turkey, vegetable at a push): a litre

a shallot or very small onion

butter: a thick slice

Arborio rice: 300g

a small glass of white wine or vermouth

To finish:

butter and grated Parmesan

For the Parmesan crisps:

finely grated Parmesan: 4 heaped tablespoons

Prepare the parsley. Pull the leaves from their stems, crack the stems with the back of a knife – their mineral scent is worth inhaling – then put them in a pan with the stock and bring to the boil. As the stock boils, turn the heat down to a low simmer. Finely chop the parsley leaves.

Peel and very finely chop the shallot and let it cook in the butter in a saucepan, without taking on any colour. Add the rice, turn the grains briefly in the butter till glossy, then pour in the wine and let it cook for a minute or two. Add a ladle of the stock. Stirring almost constantly, add another ladle of stock and continue to stir until the rice has soaked it all up. Now add the remaining stock, a ladle at a time, stirring pretty much all the time till the rice has soaked up the stock, the grains are plump and the texture creamy.

Stir in the chopped parsley, a thick slice of butter and a couple of handfuls of grated Parmesan. Season carefully.

For the Parmesan crisps, simply put heaped tablespoons of the grated Parmesan into a warm, non-stick frying pan. Press the cheese down flat with a palette knife and leave to melt. As soon as it has melted, turn once and continue cooking for a minute or so. Lift off with the palette knife and cool briefly. They will probably crisp up in seconds. Place on top of the risotto and serve.

Enough for 4

JANUARY 3
A crisp salad for a winter’s day

There are some pears and cheese left from Christmas, a couple of heads of crisp, hardy salad leaves still in fine fettle, and a plastic box of assorted sprouted seeds in the fridge. I put them together almost in desperation, yet what results is a salad that is both refreshing and uplifting, clean tasting and bright.

A salad of pears and cheese with sprouted seeds

Crisp, mild, light and fresh, this is the antidote to the big-flavoured salad. I prefer to use hard, glassy-fleshed pears straight from the fridge for this, rather than the usual ripe ones. Any sprouted seeds can be used, such as radish seeds, sunflower or mung beans. The easy-to-find bags of mixed sprouts are good here, too. The cheese is up to you. Something with a deep, fruity flavour is probably best, though I have used firm goat’s cheeses on occasion too. Rather than slicing it thickly, I remove shavings from the cheese with a vegetable peeler. A sort of contemporary ploughman’s lunch.

crisp pears: 2

bitter leaves such as frisée or trevise: 4 handfuls

firm, fruity cheese such as Berkswell: 150g

assorted sprouts (radish, alfalfa, sunflower, amaranth, etc.): a couple of handfuls

For the dressing:

natural yoghurt: 150ml

olive oil: 2 tablespoons

herbs, such as chervil, parsley, chives: a handful

Put the yoghurt into a bowl and whisk in the olive oil and a little salt and black pepper. Chop the herbs and stir them into the yoghurt.

Halve the pears, remove the cores and slice the pears thinly, then add them to the herb and yoghurt dressing.

Put the salad leaves in a serving dish. Pile the pears and their dressing on top. Using a vegetable peeler, shave off small, thin slices of the cheese and scatter them over the salad with the assorted sprouted seeds.

Enough for 2

JANUARY 5
Twelfth Night

The day that precedes Twelfth Night is often the darkest in my calendar. The sadness of taking down The Tree, packing up the mercury glass decorations in tissue and cardboard and rolling up the strings of tiny lights has long made my heart sink. Today I descend further than usual.

The rain is torrential and continuous. I clean the bedroom cupboards, make neat piles of books and untidy ones of clothes ready for the charity shop and make a list of major and minor jobs to do in the house over the next few months.

The local council collects discarded Christmas trees and recycles them for compost. I keep mine at home, cutting every branch from the main stem with secateurs and packing them into sacks. Over the next few weeks, the needles will fall and end their days around the blueberries and cloudberries in the garden. There is much that appeals about this annual cycle of the tree going back into the earth.

You would think that this day of darkness would be predictable enough for me to organise something to lift the spirits – dinner with friends or a day away from home. But the consequences of evergreens left in the house after Twelfth Night is too great a risk, even though this superstition is quite recent. So a day of dark spirits it is.

JANUARY 6
Epiphany

After yesterday’s darkness and self-indulgence, I open the kitchen door to find the garden refreshed after the rain. The air is suddenly sweet and clean, you can smell the soil, and the ivy and yew are shining bright. The dead leaves are blown away, the sky clear and white. There is a new energy and I want to cook again.

Today is an important day for those who grow their vegetables bio-dynamically, when the Three Kings preparation – a stir-up containing gold, frankincense and myrrh – is ground for an hour, then made into a paste with rain or pond water and offered to the land. Jane Scotter at Fern Verrow, the Herefordshire farmer from whom I buy the vegetables I cannot grow for myself (for which read most), says it smells ‘like a fine fruity Christmas cake’. ‘We do this to invite elemental life forces to help and guide us for the coming growing season. We ask for good things to happen and give the preparation as an offering to the earth and to give thanks for what the universe provides. It is a lovely thing to do and a chance to walk around the farm on a route not usually taken, holding thoughts of thanks and wishes to the farm on a spiritual level.’

Hippy-dippy hocus-pocus it may sound, but I have far less of a problem believing in this than I do many of the religious ceremonies practised by millions. Actually, much less so.

My energy and curiosity may be renewed but the larder isn’t. There is probably less food in the house than there has ever been. I trudge out to buy a few chicken pieces and a bag of winter greens to make a soup with the spices and noodles I have in the cupboard. What ends up as dinner is clear, bright and life-enhancing. It has vitality (that’s the greens), warmth (ginger, cinnamon) and it is economical and sustaining too. I suddenly feel ready for anything the New Year might throw at me.

Chicken noodle broth

chicken pieces and wings: 400g

black peppercorns: 8

star anise: 2

half a cinnamon stick

palm sugar: a scant teaspoon

fresh ginger: a small lump

fine, rice noodles: 200g

greens: about 400g

Thai or Vietnamese basil: a small handful

Make the chicken broth: put the chicken pieces and wings in a deep pan with the whole peppercorns, star anise, cinnamon stick and palm sugar. Peel the ginger, cut it into coins and add to the pan. Pour in a litre of water and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat and leave to simmer, at a gentle bubble, for twenty-five minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside.

Cook the noodles according to the instructions on the packet, then drain and set aside. Trim, wash and lightly steam the greens, then refresh under cold running water.

Divide the hot broth between four bowls, add the noodles and greens and finish with the basil.

Enough for 4

JANUARY 9
An old-fashioned ham, a new sauce

We have never been what you might call a ‘close’ family. A mother and father dead by the time I reached my late teens; a brother who emigrated; an uncle distanced by his obsession with religion. The family member I was closest to was a mischievous, twinkly-eyed aunt whose diet consisted solely of Cup-a-Soup, Bailey’s Irish Cream and a regular swig of Benylin. She lived to be a hundred, which puts the healthy-eating lobby firmly in its place.

When I was a child, she would take me to see my grandmother, a tiny, bent woman (I have inherited her shoulders), whose curtains were permanently drawn. My grandmother’s kitchen always had a pot on the stove and condensation running down the windows. The room was dark and smelled of boiling gammon and the smoke from the coal fire in the parlour. Yet despite the suggestion of food on its way, the scene was less than welcoming. No jolly granny with a laden tea table here, just a tired old lady, exhausted from a hard life spent bringing up five children on her own.

The smell of a ham puttering away in my own kitchen still reminds me of her – I suspect it always will – but now comes with a welcome. Thinly cut ham, warm from its cooking liquor, is a dish I too bring out to feed the hordes. Reasonably priced, presented on a large, oval plate with a jug of bright-green sauce, it seems to go a long way. A piece weighing just over a kilo will feed six, with leftovers for a winter salad the following day.

Parsley sauce is the old-school accompaniment to a dish of warm ham, but far from the only one. This week I put a bag of knobbly Jerusalem artichokes to good use, serving them roasted as a side dish to the ham and to add interest to the accompanying parsley sauce. Artichokes and parsley have an affinity with pork and with each other – I like to add bacon and the chopped herb to the roasted tubers, and snippets of crisp smoked streaky often find their way on to the surface of a bowl of parsley-freckled artichoke soup.

Any large lump of ham will do for slow cooking in water (I sometimes use apple juice). A ‘hand’ of pork, which comes from the top of the front legs and is what the French call jambonneau, is a sound cut for those who want to cook theirs on the bone. A piece of rolled and tied leg is easier to carve for a large number. A cut cooked on the bone shouldn’t give any trouble after an hour and a half on the stove. The meat should fall away with just a tug from a fork.

This is an unapologetically old-fashioned dish and the best accompaniments are those of a gentle nature: a quiet, cosseting sauce, some floury steamed potatoes and possibly the inclusion of some mild mustard, either in the sauce or on the edge of the plate. The recipe can be energised a bit in summer, when it will benefit from a bright-green, olive-oil-and herb-based sauce. But on a day as bone chilling as this, it needs an accompaniment as comforting as a goose-down duvet. We passed round a plate of apples and a lump of milky Cotherstone afterwards.

Ham with artichoke and parsley sauce

Some cooks like to soak their ham before cooking – a precaution against a salty ham. Overly salted hams seem to be a thing of the past, so I don’t bother. It is worth doing if you are unsure of your ham. I’m not convinced the sauce needs any cream but, should you wish to soften it further, 3 tablespoons of double cream will be enough. Serve with the roast artichokes below and large chunks of steamed potato.

a piece of boiling ham weighing about 1.5kg

onions: 2

bay leaves: 2

thyme: 4 short sprigs

black peppercorns: 15 or so

parsley stalks: 6–8

For the sauce:

Jerusalem artichokes: 250g

butter: a thin slice, about 20g

the onions from the ham liquor

parsley: a small bunch, about 15g

grain mustard: a tablespoon

a squeeze of lemon juice

Put the ham in a very large pot. Peel and halve the onions, then tuck them around the meat with the bay leaves, thyme sprigs and peppercorns (reserve the parsley stalks for adding later). Pour in enough water just to cover the meat – a good 2 litres. Bring to the boil, skim off the froth that rises to the surface, then leave to boil for a few minutes before turning down the heat to a simmer. Keep the liquid just below the boil (at a gentle simmer), partially covered with a lid, for an hour. Add the parsley stalks, then let it cook for a further half hour.

About half an hour or so before you are due to serve the ham, make the sauce (timing is not crucial here; both ham and sauce can keep warm without harm). Scrub and chop the artichokes. Warm the butter in a medium saucepan. Remove the onions from the ham pot with a draining spoon and put them into the butter with the artichokes. Let the artichokes cook for three or four minutes, then pour in 750ml water (you could add some of the ham cooking water if you wish, but no more than a third) and bring to the boil. Add a little salt, then turn the heat down and continue to let the artichokes simmer enthusiastically for twenty minutes or until they are on the verge of falling apart.

Roughly chop the parsley and add just over half of it to the artichokes, holding back the rest for later. Grind in a little black pepper. Simmer for five minutes or so, then remove from the heat. Whiz the sauce in a blender (never more than half filling it) till smooth and pale green. Check the seasoning, adding salt, pepper, the mustard, the reserved chopped parsley and a squeeze of lemon juice, if you wish (if you are adding cream, then you can add it now). Set aside till needed. It will take just a few minutes to reheat.

Remove the ham from its cooking liquor. Slice thinly and serve with the sauce and the roast artichokes below.

Enough for 6

Roast artichokes

You only need a couple of artichokes each. Trust me.

Jerusalem artichokes: 12 (about 800g)

olive oil

the juice of half a lemon

About an hour before the ham is due to be ready, set the oven at 180°C/Gas 4. Scrub the artichokes, slice them in half lengthways and put them in a baking dish. Pour over about 4 tablespoons of olive oil – just enough to moisten them – squeeze over the lemon, then grind over a little salt and black pepper. Toss gently and settle the artichokes cut-side down. Place in the preheated oven and bake for fifty minutes or until the outsides of the artichokes are golden and the insides meltingly soft.

JANUARY 12
Juniper – a cool spice for an arctic day

I consider leftovers as treasure, morsels of frugal goodness on which we can snack or feast, depending on the quantity. A few nuggets of leg meat from Sunday’s roast chicken are likely to be wolfed while standing at the fridge, but a decent bowlful of meat torn from the carcass could mean a filling for a pie (with onions, carrots, tarragon and cream). Today there is a thick wodge of leftover ham, its fat as white as the snow on the hedges outside, still sitting on its carving plate. A little dry round the edges from where I forgot to seal it in kitchen film, it is nevertheless going to be a base for tonight’s supper. On a warmer day, I might have eaten it sliced with a mound of crimson-fruited chutney and a bottle of beer, but the temperature is well below freezing and cold cuts and pickles will not hit the spot.

I am probably alone in holding juniper as one of my favourite spices. Its clean, citrus ‘n’ tobacco scent is both warming and refreshing. Where cumin, cinnamon and nutmeg offer us reassuring earthiness, juniper brings an arctic freshness and tantalising astringency. Growing on coniferous bushes and trees throughout the northern hemisphere and beyond, the berries, midnight blue when fresh, dry to an inky black. I delighted in finding them growing in Scotland amongst the heather. In a stoppered jar in a dark place, they keep their magic longer than almost any other spice.

The gin bottle aside, the berries are best known for their appearance in the fermented cabbage dish, sauerkraut (though I first met them in a dark, glossy sauce for pork chops). Their ability to slice through richness has led them to a life of pork recipes, from Swedish meatballs to pâté. I sometimes add them to a coarse, fat-speckled terrine for Christmas, dropping them into the mixture instead of the dusty-tasting mace. But their knife-edge quality makes them worth using with oily fish too, as in a marinade for fillets of mackerel (with sliced onions, cider vinegar, salt and dill) and a dry cure for sides of salmon (sea salt, dill and finely grated lemon zest).

Juniper berries are best used lightly squashed rather than finely ground. Crush them too much and they will bite rather than merely bark. Something you learn the hard way. A firm pounding with a pestle or the end of a rolling pin is all they need to release their oil. Their affinity with rich flesh is not confined to fat pork and oily fish. The berries have long been used to season game birds, especially towards the end of the season, when pigeon and partridge toughen and are brought to tenderness in a stew.

This (freezing) evening, as I crush the coal-black beads with the round end of a pestle, the piercing citrus notes come off the stone in cold, Nordic waves. They will invigorate my leftover ham, ripped into thick shards and tossed with onions and shredded white cabbage. Seasoned with sharp apples, brown sugar, cloves and white vinegar, my quick ham and cabbage fry up has its roots in the altogether more sophisticated sauerkraut.

A ham and cabbage fry up

A bottle of very cold beer would be appropriate here, if not downright compulsory.

butter: 30g

an onion cloves: 4

juniper berries: 15

a large, sharp apple: about 250g

white wine vinegar: 2 tablespoons

demerara sugar: a tablespoon

a hard, white cabbage: about 800g

leftover cooked ham: 250g

balsamic vinegar: a tablespoon

parsley: a small handful, roughly chopped

Melt the butter in a large, heavy-based pan over a low to moderate heat. Peel the onion and thinly slice into rounds, then add it to the butter. Throw in the cloves and the lightly crushed juniper berries (squash them flat with the side of a kitchen knife or in a pestle and mortar) and cover with a lid. Leave to cook, still over a low to moderate heat, with the occasional stir, for seven to ten minutes. The onion should be soft and lightly coloured.

Halve, core and thickly slice the apple. There is no need to peel it. Add it to the pan, then pour in the white wine vinegar and the sugar. Season with salt and pepper.

Shred the cabbage, not too finely, add it to the pan and mix lightly with the other ingredients. Cover with a tight lid and leave to soften over a lowish heat for about twenty minutes. The occasional stir will stop it sticking.

Tear or chop the ham into short, thick pieces. They are more satisfying if left large and uneven. Fold them into the cabbage, continue cooking for five minutes, then pour in the balsamic vinegar and toss in the chopped parsley. Pile into a warm dish and serve.

Enough for 2

JANUARY 13
The cook’s knife

There have been surprisingly few kitchen knives in my life. One, a thin, flexible filleting knife, has been with me since my cookery-school days; another from that era, its thin tang having come loose from the handle, is now used to gouge grass from between the garden paving stones. There is a fearsome carving blade from Sheffield, long the home of British knife making; a medium-sized, much-used Japanese knife that I regard as the perfect size and weight for me; and a tiny paring knife with a pale wooden handle that I hope stays with me to the grave.

The most used blade in my kitchen belongs to a heavy, 20cm cook’s knife. Thicker than is currently fashionable, its blade is made from carbon steel rather than the more usual stainless, which immediately marks me out as something of an old-fashioned cook. So be it. The blade, a mixture of iron and carbon, is the dull grey of a pencil lead, and heavily stained from years of lemon juice and vinegar. Its biggest sin is its habit of leaving an unpleasant grey streak on apples or tomatoes I have sliced with it, and occasionally on lemons too, but that, and the need to dry it thoroughly to prevent it rusting, is a small price to pay for a tool that is so ‘right’ it actually feels part of my body.

Picking up the right knife is like putting on a much-loved pullover. It may well have seen better days but the odd hole only seems to add to its qualities – like the wrinkles on a close friend. Price has little to do with it. My trusty vegetable peeler cost less than a loaf of bread and has dealt with a decade of potatoes and parsnips. And even if an expensive top-of-the-range Japanese knife is a pleasure to hold in the hand, it may not work any better for you than something as cheap as chips from the local ironmonger’s.

A strong, long-bladed implement is the only way to gain entry to tough-skinned squashes such as the winter pumpkins, though I have been known to take a garden axe to the odd Crown Prince variety. You need a strong blade to get through celeriac too, and sometimes the larger, end-of-season swede. A serrated bread knife might just stand in its stead, but it is rarely man enough for the job.

I brought the 20cm cook’s knife back from Japan a while ago. It is the tool I use for slicing vegetables, chopping herbs, dicing meat. I know every nick and stain on its blade. It seems inappropriate to say that the right knife is like a comfort blanket, you feel safe with it in your hand, but that is how it is.

I do, though, find it mildly disturbing to find comfort in something with which you could so easily kill someone.

Hot, sweet baked pumpkin

Initially, this was a side dish to go with a flash-fried steak. But its sticky, sweet-sharp qualities led me to serve it as a dish in its own right. In which case there is a need for a dish of steamed brown rice to go with it. This is a genuinely interesting way to combat the sugary, monotonous note of the pumpkin. The colours are ravishing.

pumpkin or butternut squash: 1.5 kg (unpeeled weight)

butter: 50g

For the dressing:

caster sugar: 4 tablespoons

water: 200ml

ginger: a thumb-sized lump

large, medium-hot red chilli: 1 limes: 2

fish sauce: 2 capfuls

coriander: a small bunch, finely chopped

Set the oven at 200°C/Gas 6. Peel the pumpkin, discard the seeds and fibres and cut the flesh into small pieces about 3cm in diameter. Put them in a roasting tin with the butter and bake for about an hour, turning them occasionally, till soft enough to take the point of a knife. They should be completely tender.

Put the sugar and water in a shallow pan and bring to the boil. Turn the heat down and leave to simmer enthusiastically till the liquid has reduced by about half. Meanwhile, peel and roughly chop the ginger and put it in a food processor. Halve the chilli lengthways and chop roughly, removing the seeds if you wish for a less spicy seasoning (I tend to leave them in for this recipe). Add the chilli to the ginger, then grate in the zest of the limes. Squeeze in the juice from the limes, then process everything to a coarse paste, pushing the mixture down the sides of the bowl from time to time with a spatula.

Stir the spice mixture into the sugar syrup and continue simmering for a minute. Add the fish sauce and coriander and remove from the heat.

When the pumpkin is fully tender, spoon most of the chilli sauce over it, toss gently to coat each piece, then return to the oven for five to ten minutes. Toss with the remaining dressing and serve.

Enough for 6 as a side dish

JANUARY 15
A slow-cooked bean hotpot. And a quick version

A dry day, warm enough to garden without a jacket. The earth, dark and moist from the week’s rain, crumbles in textbook fashion under the garden fork. There is still a scattering of bronze leaves and here and there the odd medlar that melts in your hand, leaving behind the ghost of wine dregs in a glass. Anyone with a scrap of land will value January days like these for getting the earth turned, roses pruned and stray leaves collected.

I spend a couple of hours tugging out the last of the borlotti beans, their dried stems still twisted around the hazel poles. This should have been done in December and both the bean stems and precious hazel supports snap like icicles. The odd purple-skinned potato and (useless) radish come to the surface as I fork the soil. Before I go in, I move a patch of soggy brown leaves from under the medlar tree and find three rhubarb tips poking teasingly through the soil. Their carmine rudeness against the chocolate-brown soil at first startles, then delights.

Technology excites me (be it Japanese Shinkansen trains or the next thing that Apple throws our way) but so does the celebration of slow, time-honoured rituals. The way of living that hasn’t changed in centuries. Houses built or restored using traditional methods, treading grapes to make wine (yes, a tiny number of vineyards still do it) and anything hand made. Last night I soaked beans for a hotpot. I could have opened a can of course, and sometimes I do, but the idea of doing something just as it has been done for thousands of years appeals to me. So I soak them, a mixture of small white haricot and black-eyed beans. You can soak different varieties of bean together if they are the sort that enjoy the same cooking time (long, oval flageolet take less than the rounder beans). Covering the beans with an equal volume of water is usually enough. But they should be drained and rinsed the following day. This will effectively reduce the oligosaccharides, those complex, indigestible sugars that make us fart. More importantly, it cuts down the cooking time.

A crisp-crusted hotpot of aubergines and beans

If you haven’t soaked beans the night before, or simply can’t be bothered, then use canned haricot or black-eyed beans for this. You will need three 400g cans, drained and rinsed.

dried haricot or black-eyed beans: 450g

bay leaves: 2

aubergines: 2 (about 500g in total)

olive oil

onions: 2

garlic: 3 cloves

rosemary: 3 stems

dried oregano: 1 tablespoon

chopped tomatoes: two 400g cans

For the crust:

white bread, not too crusty: 125g

a clove of garlic, peeled and crushed

grated Parmesan: 30g

a lemon

rosemary: 2 or 3 sprigs

dried oregano: 1 teaspoon

olive oil: 3 tablespoons

Put the beans into a deep bowl, cover with cold water and leave overnight. In the morning, drain off any remaining water, rinse the beans, then tip them into a large saucepan and cover with at least 2 litres of water. Bring to the boil, then skim off the froth that rises to the surface. Lower the heat to a jolly simmer, add the bay leaves and partially cover the pan with a lid. Leave the beans to cook for forty-five minutes, till almost tender. They should give a little when squeezed between finger and thumb. Drain the beans and set aside.

Cut the aubergines in half lengthways, then cut each half into about 8 thick slices. Warm 4 tablespoons of olive oil in a casserole. Fry the aubergines, in two or three batches, till pale gold on both sides and soft in the middle, then remove and drain on kitchen paper. Add more oil to the pan and lower the heat as necessary for each batch. The pieces of aubergine must be soft and tender.

Set the oven at 200°C/Gas 6. Peel and roughly chop the onions. Add to the empty casserole with a tablespoon or two of olive oil and leave over a moderate heat till they have softened. While the onions are cooking, peel and thinly slice the garlic and finely chop the needles from the rosemary stems. Add to the onions with the oregano and leave to soften. The onions shouldn’t colour.

Add the tomatoes to the onions and garlic and bring to the boil, then stir in the drained beans and the aubergines. Fill an empty tomato can with water and pour it into the pan. Once the mixture has returned to the boil, turn off the heat. Cover the pan, transfer to the oven and bake for 45 minutes.

Make the crust by reducing the bread to coarse crumbs in a food processor. Add the garlic and the Parmesan cheese, then season with black pepper and a little salt. Finely grate the lemon zest and add it to the crumbs. Remove the rosemary needles from their stems and chop them finely. Stir into the crumbs with the dried oregano. Pour the olive oil into the breadcrumbs and toss gently; you want them to be lightly moist.

Remove the bean dish from the oven and spoon the crumbs on top. Return to the oven, uncovered, and bake for twenty to twenty-five minutes or until the crust is crisp and the colour of a biscuit.

Enough for 4

JANUARY 18
Cheating with puff pastry

There are two ways of making a savoury puff pastry crust. I sometimes take a quiet afternoon to blend flour and butter and roll, fold, chill, roll and roll again. With Radio 4 on in the background, making puff or rough puff pastry is as much therapy as cooking. I use the ready-made stuff from the freezer, too. It’s a cop out, a cheat, but really, who cares? The brands made with butter have a good flavour, are crisp and light and often, helpfully, come ready rolled into sheets. It means I can have a pie such as tonight’s chicken and leek without making my own pastry.

A hearty pie of chicken and leeks

chicken thighs on the bone: 350g

chicken breasts: 350g

half an onion

peppercorns: 8

a bay leaf

milk, to cover

butter: 30g

smoked streaky bacon: 6 rashers

leeks: 2 medium

plain flour: 3 lightly heaped tablespoons

Dijon mustard: 3 teaspoons

puff pastry: a 375g sheet

a little beaten egg and milk

grated Parmesan

Put the chicken pieces into a large saucepan, together with the half onion, peppercorns, bay leaf and enough milk just to cover the chicken. Bring to the boil, then, just when it starts to bubble, lower the heat and leave to simmer, partially covered by a lid, for twenty minutes. Remove the chicken, reserving the milk, and pull the meat from the bones. Cut it into small, plump pieces.

Set the oven at 200°C/Gas 6. Melt the butter in a large saucepan, add the bacon, cut into small pieces, and let it soften without colouring over a moderate to low heat. Slice the leeks into pieces roughly 1cm thick. Wash them very thoroughly, then add them to the bacon and continue cooking for about fifteen minutes, till they are totally soft.

Stir the flour into the leek and bacon, continue cooking for a couple of minutes, then gradually strain in enough of the warm milk to make a thick sauce. Fold in the chicken and check the seasoning, adding the mustard and a generous grinding of salt and pepper.

Roll one half of the pastry out into a rectangle 27cm x 37cm and transfer it to a baking sheet. Spoon the filling on to the pastry, leaving a wide rim all the way round. Brush the rim with beaten egg and milk. Roll out the second piece of pastry to the same size as the base and lower it over the filling. Press and crimp the edges together firmly to seal them. It is worth making certain the edges are tightly sealed, otherwise the filling may leak.

Brush the pastry all over with the beaten egg wash and scatter a handful of grated Parmesan over the surface. Bake for thirty-five minutes or till golden.

Enough for 6

Poached apples with ginger and anise

Warm apples in a gently spiced syrup are useful as both a breakfast dish and a dessert. Sweet but refreshing, and pleasingly simple, these poached fruits are also good served thoroughly chilled. A nice change from creamy desserts. Odd as it seems, we ate this outside in the snow. The ginger-scented warmth and clarity of the juice encouraged us to eat it standing up in the garden, marvelling at the tall hedges weighed down with snow and the slowly darkening sky.

small to medium dessert apples: 3

the juice of half a lemon

unfiltered apple juice: 400ml

golden caster sugar: 2 tablespoons

star anise: 2

ginger preserved in syrup: 40g

syrup from the ginger jar: 4 tablespoons

Peel the apples, halve them and remove their cores. Toss gently in the lemon juice. Pour the apple juice into a pan large enough to accommodate the apples, then add the caster sugar, star anise, the ginger, sliced into coins, and the ginger syrup. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat so the liquid simmers gently.

Lower the fruit into the simmering syrup and leave, partially covered with a lid, until they are tender. They are ready when a skewer will glide effortlessly through their flesh – fifteen to twenty minutes or so.

Lift the fruit from the syrup with a draining spoon and place on a serving dish or in smaller individual dishes. Turn up the heat and bring the syrup to the boil. Serve warm, three halves of fruit per person, in little dishes or glasses with some of the apple- and spice-scented syrup spooned over.

Enough for 3

JANUARY 20
A golden fruit

A need for something sweet so I walk along London’s Edgware Road, with its Lebanese grocer’s and pastry shops. On a winter’s afternoon, this road north of Marble Arch is where I go to stock up on what we used to call sweetmeats – the tiny, sugary fruits and pastries that mark the end of a meal. Though I should add that they come out with coffee too, mid morning.

Today there are boxes of darkly sticky dates, powdery lokum, the Turkish delight whose chewy translucency comes scented with rose, pistachio and lemon, and crates of fat, gritty figs. Any of these will signify the full stop at the end of dinner as effectively as a slice of pie (though I would rather have the latter, if I’m honest). There are crimson pomegranates too, lemons on the twig, and tangerines sold with their leaves. There are pale and milky walnuts in their shells, sugared almonds and sultanas the colour of Sauternes.

Today I come back with a small box of honey-soaked pistachio pastries, a bag of fudge-textured dates, some thick, snow-white Lebanese yoghurt and a polystyrene tray of lamb chops the size of a baby’s fist. They will be grilled and dipped into hummus. Almost absentmindedly, I also pick up a handful of golden, pear-shaped quinces.

Despite its delicate fragrance, the quince is a harsh taskmaster. You need a strong wrist and a good knife to get through its hard flesh, and patience to see it cook through to tenderness. Your efforts will be rewarded though. Cooked slowly, this rock-hard fruit will be transformed into one of glowing colour and gently honeyed flavour. If you leave one to simmer with sugar and water, it will eventually turn a deep, translucent crimson.

Just two quinces in an apple pie are enough to imbue the entire filling with their scent and flavour. The quince’s flesh is considerably drier and more grainy than the apple, and needs additional moisture and time in which to cook. I put them on first, adding the apples only once the quince is showing signs of softness. In Tender, I used them in a pickle, a crumble and to sweeten a dish of slow-cooked lamb, but I spent today working them into a pie. Instead of a pastry crust, I have enclosed them in a loose form of crumble, so that the amber fruit shows through.

This tart needs a good hour or more of our time, but is really rather good. Serve it with a jug of cream or a scoop of crème fraîche.

Quince and apple tart

a lemon

quinces: 500g

caster sugar: 2 tablespoons

maple syrup: 3 tablespoons

sweet apples: 750g

For the top:

plain flour: 150g

butter: 75g

demerara sugar: 75g

an egg, lightly beaten

For the crust:

butter: 100g, at room temperature

caster sugar: 80g

an egg, lightly beaten

plain flour: 200g

Make the pastry crust: dice the butter and put into a food mixer or processor with the sugar. Cream till light and fluffy, then add the egg and mix thoroughly. Spoon in the flour, bring the dough into a ball – it will be quite soft – then place on a generously floured work surface or board. Knead briefly; this will make it easier to work. Roll out the dough to fit a 22cm tart tin with a removable base, pushing it carefully into the corners and up the sides, patching any tears as you go. Refrigerate for twenty minutes.

Put a baking sheet in the oven and set it at 200°C/Gas 6. To make the filling, squeeze the lemon into a mixing bowl. Peel and core the quinces, then chop them into small pieces, tossing them in the lemon juice as you go to stop them browning. Place them in a deep saucepan, add the sugar and maple syrup, cover with a lid and leave over a low heat for fifteen minutes, until tender enough for you to insert a metal skewer into them easily. Check regularly and lower the heat if necessary, particularly towards the end of cooking when the syrup has reduced.

Meanwhile, core and dice the apples – there is no need to peel them. Stir them into the quinces as soon as the quinces are almost tender. Continue cooking, covered, for five to ten minutes or until the apples are just soft. Set aside.

Make the topping: put the flour and butter into a food processor and blitz till they resemble fine breadcrumbs. Alternatively, rub the butter into the flour with your fingers. Add the sugar and the egg and mix briefly to a moist, crumbly texture.

Fill the uncooked tart case with the apple and quince mixture, setting aside any juice, then scatter the crumble topping over. Some of the fruit will show through. Lift on to the hot baking sheet and bake for thirty minutes, till the crust and pastry are crisp and golden. Allow to settle a little before serving with a trickle of the reserved juices and some cream or crème fraîche.

Enough for 6–8

JANUARY 21
Browning meat. More quinces

Putting a piece of meat into a shallow layer of sizzling-hot fat, butter, duck fat, dripping or oil will do wonders for its flavour. Whilst it won’t actually ‘seal in’ the juices, as is often suggested, getting the cut surfaces of the meat to brown will enrich both the flavour of the meat and, rather importantly, the juices in the pan. It is worth doing. But here’s the rub. The meat must be given time to brown properly, and that means we need to leave it alone. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen meat, particularly beef, moved constantly round with a spoon or spatula. Hard as it is not to tinker, we must leave it alone long enough for the cut surfaces to colour appetisingly, otherwise the action is pointless.

Quick, mildly spiced beef

rapeseed oil

cubed beef (e.g. chuck steak): 500g

onions: 2 large

garlic: 3 cloves

ground cumin: 2 teaspoons

ground coriander: 2 teaspoons

garam masala: 1 tablespoon

vegetable or beef stock: 500ml

grain mustard: a tablespoon

double cream: 200ml

Warm a little oil in a heavy, shallow casserole. Season the beef with salt and black pepper, then colour on all sides in the oil, turning only occasionally. Remove from the pan with a draining spoon.

Meanwhile, halve, peel and thinly slice the onions. Peel and thinly slice the garlic. Add the onions and garlic to the pan, letting them soften a little but not brown beyond pale honey colour. Stir in the ground cumin, coriander and garam masala, then continue cooking for five minutes before returning the meat and any juices to the pan. Pour in the stock, bring to the boil and simmer for ten minutes, till the liquid has reduced by half.

Stir in the mustard, pour in the cream and bring to the boil. Check the seasoning and serve.

Enough for 4

Baked quince with orange and mascarpone ginger crunch

The quince once seemed so impenetrable. Mentions of membrillo and quince liqueur did nothing to invite entry to the rock-hard, yellow fruit that resembled a dumpy papaya. Ten years on, I take a deep casserole from the oven, the five fruits split, their soft, almost fluffy, pink flesh peeping through, and marvel at their beauty. There is orange in there too, vanilla in its sticky pod and a single cinnamon stick. The steam beguiles and amuses with its notes of amber, orange blossom and spice. The quince has come a long way in this kitchen. I guess we all have.

quinces: 4 large

oranges: 3

a cinnamon stick

a vanilla pod

For the mascarpone ginger crunch:

ginger biscuits: 75g

mascarpone: 200g

Set the oven at 200°C/Gas 6. Put the quinces in a deep casserole, piercing them here and there with a small knife or skewer as you go.

Halve and juice the oranges and pour into the casserole, add the cinnamon stick and vanilla pod and then cover with a lid. Bake for an hour or so, till the skins have wrinkled and the flesh is tender to the point of a knife.

For the ginger crunch, crush the biscuits, either in a plastic bag with a rolling pin or in a food processor, but not too finely. They should have a mixture of textures from gravel to coarse sand. Fold the biscuits into the mascarpone.

Remove the quinces from the juice, place on small plates and serve with the pan juices and the mascarpone ginger crunch.

Enough for 4

JANUARY 22
A potato crust for a fish pie…

I do love a fish pie, with its flaky, undulating pastry crust or deep, furrowed lid of mashed potatoes crisped in the oven. For an everyday fish pie, the sort I might make for a midweek supper, I take a shortcut with the crust, using breadcrumbs and herbs blitzed in the food processor or thin slices of potato. That way I get a crisp lid as a contrast to the softness underneath without having to make and roll pastry. When time is of less importance, at the weekend, say, I use a more traditional crust of butter and flour or potatoes whipped up with parsley and butter to contrast with the deep, creamy, piscine filling.

Which fish I use for a pie will change according to supply, whim and conscience. Fish is rarely a cheap eat, but we can trim the bill a little by choosing the less popular varieties such as ling and whiting and, if it is to our taste, coley (try as I might, I can’t find much excitement in a piece of coley). A sustainable alternative to the knee-jerk varieties is crucial and I have had much success with pollack and line-caught haddock. I’m getting used to gurnard too, a bit of an ugly bugger but with a reasonable flavour. A firm-textured fish once used as lobster bait and now appearing on menus everywhere, from Moro to Rick Stein’s restaurants in Padstow, the gurnard responded well to being baked with cream and basil. I introduced a potato top, neat slices laid one overlapping the next, a way of padding out a few fish fillets to make them go a bit further. It’s a sweet and gentle pie, without the stodge of one crowned with mashed potatoes (good though they can be). Something to serve with steamed purple sprouting broccoli or the salad that follows.

Gurnard, basil and potato pie

potatoes: 400g

a large onion

olive oil: 2 tablespoons

gurnard or similar white fish: 4 large fillets (about 450g), skinned

basil leaves: 15g

double cream: 250ml

butter

Peel the potatoes, slice them roughly the thickness of a pound coin, bring them to the boil in lightly salted water, then leave to cook at a gentle boil for five or six minutes. Drain and set aside. Set the oven at 200°C/Gas 6.

Peel and finely slice the onion, then let it cook in the oil in a shallow oven-proof pan for five to ten minutes, till it has softened but not coloured. Switch off the heat. Season the fish fillets with salt and black pepper, then place them on top of the onion. Shred the basil leaves and stir them into the cream with a light seasoning of salt. Pour the cream over the fish, then lay the sliced potatoes on top, neatly and slightly overlapping. Season and dot the surface with butter.

Bake for thirty to forty minutes, till the potatoes have lightly browned.

Enough for 2

…and the beauty of a winter salad

The crisp, winter leaves – trevise, radicchio, in fact all the chicories – have a beauty not present in the lush green leaves of summer. Their wayward curls, like tendrils of squid, the flashes of magenta, rose and blood-red on white as if they have been painted by hand, all lead us to want to use these leaves whole rather than chopped or torn. The shape of the leaves is as much a part of their attraction as their flavour, their dazzling colours only becoming clear and bright in cold weather. Just as importantly, there is a bitterness to the winter leaves that makes them a perfect match for the sweetness of walnuts, mild cheeses (the Gloucesters, the Beaufort family) and bacon.

I find something endearing about the fact that the sweeter leaves are those nearest the heart. The most bitter – and the ones I like the most – are the ones that grow on the outside. The more light they receive, the deeper their pungency. The intensely coloured, rabbit-eared raddichios are especially handsome on a white plate. The one that melts people’s hearts is the Castelfranco variety, with its cream, rough-edged leaves speckled with maroon and pink. It’s a rare find, but a showstopper on the plate, perhaps with slices of Russet apple.

I grow several varieties of winter lettuce in pots in the cold frame. They seem to sit there sulking, then take me by surprise by appearing as fist-sized whorls of beautiful, rose-tinted leaves with freckles of deepest burgundy. The cold spurs on their growth, just as it does the snowdrops and narcissi in the garden. There is the curiously waxy claytonia, sometimes known as winter purslane, landcress with its iron-rich flavour, buttery lamb’s lettuce, and all of them can be grown outdoors, even when there is frost on the ground. Sow in August and harvest all winter.

The dressings for winter salads are something I tend to introduce a touch of sweetness to, in the form of walnut oil or balsamic vinegar, as a knee-jerk contrast. Occasionally it is worth flying more dangerously and adding other pungent flavours – capers, gherkins, mustard and salty, palate-cleansing cheeses – to the leaves too. The shock of the bitter, the sour and the pungent, together with the crunch of the leaves, makes for refreshing, sense-awakening eating.

Winter leaves with gherkins and mustard

white chicory, frisée or other crisp, bitter winter leaves: 4 double handfuls

watercress: a large bunch

For the dressing:

a large egg yolk

Parmesan: 50g, finely grated

Dijon mustard: a teaspoon

white wine vinegar: a teaspoon

mild olive oil: about 100ml

gherkins: 2 tablespoons, finely chopped

capers: a teaspoon, rinsed

To make the dressing, put the egg yolk into a food processor, add the grated Parmesan, mustard and wine vinegar and switch the machine on. Pour in the oil rather slowly, as if you were making mayonnaise. Stop adding it when you have a smooth sauce that is thin enough to fall slowly from a spoon. Stir in the chopped gherkins and rinsed capers. Add no salt.

Rinse and trim the salad leaves, removing any tough stalks from the watercress. Spin or shake dry. Gently toss the leaves in the dressing and pile on to plates.

Enough for 4

JANUARY 28
Using up the marzipan

There is some marzipan left over from Christmas. It’s the uncoloured sort, a soft shade of buttermilk, which I brought back from a trip to Oslo at the beginning of Advent. Made from ground almonds, sugar and egg moulded into a stiff paste, marzipan is a like-it or loathe-it thing. I like it best coated with bitter chocolate, partly because the coating keeps the almond paste moist but also because of the contrast of crisp chocolate and soft, sweet marzipan. I must admit to a curious soft spot for those slightly stale-tasting marzipan fruits and vegetables from Palermo (carrots, apples, peaches and even cauliflowers) that you can buy at Christmas.

Although marzipan originated in Persia, where it is often flavoured with orange flower water, almost every almond-producing country has its own version. The almond paste is linked to any manner of ceremonies, from the wedding feasts of the Aegean to All Souls’ Day – il giorno dei morti – in Palermo. But mostly, marzipan, massepain (French), mazpon (India) or mazapan (Philippines), is just as much a part of Christmas as mince pies.

I bought mine in Norway only because I had browsed a little too long in a cake-decorating shop and felt guilty not making a purchase, but it is essential to read the packet. A few versions sold abroad are made with peanuts or cashews instead of almonds. I have yet to taste persipan, the version made from peach kernels. It sounds fun.

The marzipan from Lübeck in Germany is reputed to be the finest, partly because of the high percentage of almonds to sugar. A general rule is that the more gaudy the presentation, the lower the quality is likely to be. The cheaper brands tend to contain sugar syrup and a hefty dose of colouring and flavouring.

I sometimes make my own, combining finely ground almonds with a mixture of icing and caster sugar, egg yolk and a little grated orange zest. It’s a pleasing sugar and spice job, something for a frosty or even snowy afternoon.

Whilst in Norway, I came across some shallow, moist almond cakes studded with dark berries that had a little almond paste in them. Once home, I set about tinkering with my classic almond sponge mixture and some frozen blackcurrants and blueberries, but it was only once I added some crumblings of marzipan that my cakes approached those I had eaten rather too many of in Oslo. Recipes like this are trial and error, but I eventually got it to where I wanted it to be: the cake crumb moist and slightly squidgy, the fruit seeping its sharp juice, and here and there sweet nuggets of almond paste.

Almond, marzipan and berry cakes

My version of the sweet, almond-scented cakes I ate in one of Oslo’s most popular new-wave bakeries.

You will need six shallow round cake tins about 10cm in diameter or rectangular baking tins, about 8cm x 10cm.

butter: 180g

caster sugar: 180g

eggs: 2, lightly beaten

plain flour: 80g

ground almonds: 150g

marzipan: 100g

berries (assorted blueberries and currants), fresh or frozen: 200g

icing sugar

Line the cake tins with baking parchment. Set the oven at 180°C/Gas 4.

Using an electric beater, cream the butter and sugar together till pale and fluffy. Gradually beat in the eggs, then slowly introduce the flour and ground almonds. Once they are incorporated, stop the machine immediately.

Break the marzipan into small pieces about 1–2cm in diameter. Stir these into the mixture. Divide it between the baking tins, then scatter the fruit over the top of each. Bake for forty minutes, till lightly firm to the touch. Remove from the oven, dust with icing sugar and leave to cool before serving.

Makes 6

JANUARY 30
And using up the marmalade

The opened jars of sweet preserves in the fridge seem to be multiplying. I don’t mind, I think of them as treasure. Right now there are blackcurrant, damson and mulberry jams; a pot of lemon curd and another of damson jelly; French apricot jam, some Lebanese rose petal jelly and three different marmalades. Three. One of these jars of orange preserve I proudly made myself last February from organic, green-tinged Seville oranges, the other two were gifts, finer than my own and with fewer strips of peel. I have the urge to use all three up, scraping out every last amber mouthful with a teaspoon, getting my knuckles sticky in the process, and use the sweet-sharp jelly in an ice cream. The recipe is an experiment, a marriage of shards of bitter chocolate and orange preserve. I end up with beautiful, custard-coloured, soft-scoop ice cream of which I am almost absurdly proud.

Ice cream, when it is home made, has a habit of setting like a brick. Many is the time I have sat, well beyond midnight, chipping off little shards and flakes with a teaspoon. The classical way round this is to add some glucose syrup to the mix, resulting in a soft-scoop texture. Adding marmalade turns out to work much the same magic, only in a way that seems more wholesome. The ice is the most silkily textured I have ever made. The flavours are stunning. If only cooking was always like this.

Marmalade chocolate chip ice cream

single or whipping cream: 500ml

egg yolks: 4

golden caster sugar: 2 tablespoons

marmalade: 400g

dark chocolate: 100g, roughly chopped

Bring the cream to the boil. Beat the egg yolks and sugar in a heatproof bowl till thick, then pour in the hot cream and stir. Rinse the saucepan and return the custard to it, stirring the mixture over a low heat till it starts to thicken slightly. It won’t become really thick. Cool the custard quickly – I do this by plunging the pan into a shallow sink of cold water – stirring constantly, then chill thoroughly.

Stir the marmalade into the chilled custard. Now you can either make the ice cream by hand or use an ice-cream machine. If making it in a machine, pour in the custard and churn according to the manufacturer’s instructions. When the ice cream is almost thick enough to transfer to the freezer, fold in the chopped chocolate, churning briefly to mix. Scoop into a plastic, lidded box and freeze till you are ready.

If you are making it by hand, pour the custard and the chopped chocolate into a freezer box and place it in the freezer, removing it and giving it a quick beat with a whisk every hour until it has set.

Enough for 6

February

FEBRUARY 4

It wasn’t, on reflection, the wisest of days to make marmalade. I had pruned the roses, the temperature was a degree or two below freezing, and the skin around my thumbnail had cracked open in the cold. Each drop of bitter orange juice, each squirt of lemon zest sent shots of stinging pain through my thumb. But the Seville orange season is over in the blink of an eye and sometimes you just have to shut up and get on with things.

Marmalade making is about as pleasurable as cooking can get. It isn’t something for those whose only reason for cooking is the finished product. If the process of peeling oranges, painstakingly cutting their skin into fine strands and constantly checking their progress on the stove is a chore, then don’t do it. There is enough exceptionally good cottage-industry marmalade out there. Go and buy it. Making marmalade is a kitchen job to wallow in, to breathe in every bittersweet spray of zest, enjoy the prickle of the fruit’s oils on your skin and fill the house with the scent of orange nectar (or, of course, screech with pain as the bitter juice gets into your wounds).

Each stage, and there are several, carries with it waves of extraordinary pleasure. I say extraordinary because it is not every day you get the chance to fill the house with a lingering smell that starts as bright and clean as orange blossom on a cold winter breeze and ends, a day later, with a house that smells as welcoming as warm honey. There is something heart-warmingly generous about marmalade makers. I can’t tell you how many jars I have been given over the years. In my experience they like nothing more than passing their golden pots of happiness on to others.

There must be hundreds of recipes, but it is the method that changes rather than the ratio of ingredients. Some cooks swear by boiling the oranges whole, then chopping them; others cut the fruit into whole slices, others still include the pith in the jam itself, while some nitpickingly remove it. I have met cooks who chuck their boiled peel in the food processor, some who add a lemon or two, and those who introduce a couple of sweet oranges. It probably goes without saying that there is someone out there making it in minutes in the microwave (and surely missing the whole damn point).

The method you choose will depend on how you like your marmalade. Don’t probe a marmalade fan on the subject of texture unless you are actually in need of a Mogadon. Some of us like ours soft and syrupy, others prefer a jam that will stand to attention on the spoon. I like my peel in thin, hair-like strips, while friends insist on juicy chunks. Then there are those who leave the fruit in whole slices or cut it into fat nuggets. In my experience the latter produces the marmalade most likely to fall off your toast while you are engrossed in Nancy Banks-Smith or the Today programme. Lastly, there’s the lot who insist on sieving their pith out altogether. And the lovely thing is that each and every one of us is right.

I like my marmalade to shine in the morning sun. A bright, jewel-like mixture with thin strands of peel, quivering, but not so loosely set that it drips down the sleeves of my dressing gown. The point of this golden jam is its bittersweet quality. It’s a wake-up call in a jar. That is why we eat it first thing in the morning. The bitter oranges you need are available for a short season in January and February.

I know I am stepping into deep water giving a marmalade recipe, which is partly why it has taken me twenty years to get round to offering you one, but marmalade recipes are very personal things and we marmalade makers are a proud bunch (which is possibly another reason why we give so much of it away). But here it is, a little pot or two of bright, shining happiness, full of bittersweet flavour and stinging thumbs.

Seville orange marmalade

I made two batches this year. One with organic fruit, the other not. The flavour of the organic one shone most brilliantly and took less time to reach setting point.

Makes enough to fill about 5 or 6 jam jars.

Seville oranges: 1.3kg

lemons: 2

golden granulated sugar: 2.6kg

Using a small, particularly sharp kitchen knife, score four lines down each fruit from top to bottom, as if you were cutting it into quarters. Let the knife cut through the peel without piercing the fruit. Remove the peel, cut each quarter of peel into fine shreds (or thicker slices if you like a chunkier texture) and put into a large bowl. Squeeze in the juice from the peeled oranges and lemons with your hands, chop the pulp and add it, removing the pips. Add 2.5 litres of cold water. Tie the pips in a muslin bag and push into the peel and juice. Set aside in a cold place and leave overnight.

The next day, tip the mixture into a large stainless steel or enamelled pan (or a preserving pan for those lucky enough to have one) and push the muslin bag down under the juice. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat so that the liquid continues to simmer merrily. It is ready when the peel is totally soft and translucent. This can take anything from forty minutes to a good hour and a half, depending purely on how thick you have cut your peel (this time, mine took forty-five minutes).

Once the fruit is ready, lift out the muslin bag and leave it in a bowl until it is cool enough to handle. Add the sugar to the peel and juice and turn up the heat, bringing the marmalade to a rolling boil. Squeeze every last bit of juice from the reserved muslin bag into the pan. Skim off any froth that rises to the surface (if you don’t, your preserve will be cloudy). Leave at a fast boil for fifteen minutes. Remove a tablespoon of the preserve, put it on a plate and pop it into the fridge for a few minutes. If a thick skin forms on the surface of the refrigerated marmalade, then it is ready and you can switch the heat off. If the tester is still liquid, then let the marmalade boil for longer, testing every ten to fifteen minutes. Some mixtures can take up to fifty minutes to reach setting consistency. Ladle into sterilised pots and seal immediately.

FEBRUARY 7
Fish, some new thoughts

I like February, with its grey-white skies and snowdrops. In the kitchen it is the time for long-cooked dishes of earth-coloured pulses, meat on its bones and home-made cakes. A month of beans, bones and baking. But it is also the month I go on holiday. Not towards warmth and bright sunshine, but places cold and icy, with crisp air that reminds you that you are alive.

Little feels more right than eating fish within a few steps of the sea. A lunch in Oslo, now a favourite place to escape, of fish soup flavoured with basil, eaten within sight of seventy white masts in a harbour with water like a black mirror, feels about as right as any meal I have ever eaten. Even more so as I saw the fish arrive barely twenty minutes before.

I have eaten nothing but fish for several days now – give or take the odd marzipan-filled, cardamom-scented maple syrup bun. The most curious was my lunch yesterday, of Arctic char served with chestnuts, bacon and apple purée. You feel it shouldn’t work, the flavours being more suited to pork or perhaps reindeer, but it does. A dish ordered partly out of novelty, partly out of disbelief. It’s clever, because the apples are cut into the tiniest imaginable dice and mixed with celery before being fried and served with the fish. It is a bit of a nancy presentation, but it leaves me inspired enough to have a go at home.

I have always loved the colour grey. Peaceful, elegant, understated; the colour of stone, steel and soft, nurturing rain. The view from the window across the harbour has every shade, from driftwood to charcoal: the lagoon, the restaurant’s weathered cedar cladding, the moored boats, the trees on the opposite shore, all in delicate shades of calming grey.

The monotones through the window aren’t altered by my plate of scallops, two if we are being precise, shallow fried, with a julienne of apple on top. Creamy, buttery cauliflower purée, black pepper and tiny bits of fried cauliflower complete the dish. It’s a study in cream and white on a white plate, eaten under a stainless sky. A scene of such subtlety it makes everything else look gaudy and crass. There is risotto too, a blissful combination of smoked cod and spinach. As soon as I am off the plane, back in my own kitchen, I will ape that restaurant’s sublime risotto.

A risotto of smoked cod and spinach

And I did …

milk: 450ml

smoked cod or haddock: 400g

bay leaves: 2

black peppercorns: 6

hot stock: 450ml

a small onion

butter: 50g

Arborio or other risotto rice: 250g

a glass of white wine

spinach leaves: 2 handfuls

Pour the milk into a saucepan large enough to take the fish. Place the fish in the milk, add the bay leaves and peppercorns, then bring to the boil. As soon as the milk shows signs of foaming, lower the heat and simmer for ten minutes. Turn off the heat and leave the milk to infuse with the fish and aromatics. Heat the stock in a saucepan; it should simmer lightly whilst you are making the risotto.

Peel and finely chop the onion, then fry gently in the butter in a broad, heavy-bottomed pan. When the onion is soft and translucent, and before it colours, add the rice and briefly stir it through the butter to coat the grains. Pour in the wine, let it evaporate, then add the stock a ladleful at a time, allowing each one to be soaked up by the rice before adding the next, stirring continually and keeping the heat moderate to low. Once the stock has been used up, change to the milk, strained of its peppercorns. By the time almost all the milk has been absorbed, the grains should be soft and plump yet with a firm bite to them. Season carefully. The total cooking time will probably be about twenty minutes, maybe a few minutes longer.

Wash the spinach leaves, tear them into small pieces, then stir them into the rice. Break the fish into large, juicy flakes and add them to the rice, folding them in but keeping the flakes as whole as possible. Check the seasoning and serve.

Enough for 2 generous servings

FEBRUARY 9
A little brown stew for a little brown day

A certain calm comes over the kitchen when there is any sort of grain simmering on the stove. The steam from brown rice, spelt or pot barley brings with it a quiet benevolence that I am grateful for on a grey-brown day like today. With a house in turmoil (I remain holed up in my tiny study while the plasterers plaster, painters paint and welders weld) the homely smell of boiled rice is somehow reassuring.

All the grains appeal to me but I am becoming partial to the quiet pleasures of pearled spelt (think pearl barley but made from wheat). The pale-brown wheat grain makes a pleasing change from Arborio rice in a risotto and adds a chewy note to a herb salad, but is something to consider for bulking up a casserole, too. The small, oval grains plump up like Sugar Puffs with the aromatic cooking liquor from a stew, taking on a velvety texture whilst making the dish both more substantial and more economical.

The mushroom stew on the hob today is rich and earthy enough but is hardly going to fill anyone. A couple of handfuls of spelt, boiled in lightly salted water and drained, will help turn what is essentially an accompaniment into something resembling a main course. Mushroom sauce becomes mushroom stew.

Spelt is said to be easy on the digestion and I have to agree. Some of us who find modern wheat heavy and soporific have no such trouble with the modern versions of ancient strains such as spelt. The ancestors of this mild, nubby grain spread across central Europe during the Bronze Age and were in common use in southern Britain by 500BC. Available for years in the sort of food shops that smell of brown rice and massage oil, spelt has recently taken a step towards the mainstream.

The sense of peace and humble bonhomie you get from simmering grain (akin, I think, to Chinese dumplings steaming in their bamboo baskets) is slightly lost when pearled spelt is stirred into a risotto but is there in spades when it is simmering in water, its steam rising in soft clouds. Like brown rice, it has an affinity with mushrooms, onions and the more earthy spices, but has less of the hardcore ‘wholemeal’ character.

A little brown stew of mushrooms and spelt

Use fancy mushrooms if you wish, but I rather like this made with an everyday mixture of flat ‘field’ mushrooms and the small chestnut variety. Add the mushrooms according to their size and thickness, leaving anything particularly small and delicate till last. By field mushrooms I mean the wide, flat variety that are usually served on toast.

dried mushrooms: a tablespoon (8g)

pearled spelt: 250g

a medium onion

olive oil: 4 tablespoons

garlic: 2 cloves, crushed

assorted fresh mushrooms: 850g

tomato purée: a tablespoon

plain flour: a tablespoon

dried chilli flakes: ½ teaspoon

Put the dried mushrooms in a heatproof bowl, cover with 500ml hot water from the kettle and set aside.

Boil the spelt in lightly salted water for fifteen minutes, then drain and set aside.

Peel and roughly chop the onion. Warm the olive oil in a large pan. Add the onion and leave to soften, with the occasional stir to stop it burning, over a moderate heat. When it is pale gold – a matter of ten to fifteen minutes – add the crushed garlic and continue cooking for two or three minutes.

Finely slice the fresh mushrooms. Stir them into the onion and continue cooking for about five minutes, till they are starting to colour.

Stir in the tomato purée. Cook for two or three minutes, then stir in the flour. Pour in the dried mushrooms and their soaking water and bring to the boil. As soon as the liquid is boiling, lower the heat, season with salt and black pepper and stir in the dried chilli flakes. Leave to simmer for ten minutes, then add the cooked spelt. Cook for a further ten to fifteen minutes, until the mushrooms are soft and silky and the sauce is rich and lightly thickened. Serve in shallow bowls.

Enough for 4

FEBRUARY 10
Down to the bone

Having work done on the kitchen has given me the privilege of seeing the bones of this house. Not just the oak laths and plaster but the long joists that form the skeleton of the old girl. Peering beneath the sagging ceilings, walls and floors has given me a clue as to how the building, and particularly the kitchen, was built. There is something empowering about knowing how something was put together – a toy plane (yes, I was one of those Airfix kids), a house, a car and most of all, a recipe.

I get pleasure from cooking with the bits of an animal that clearly show their function – what they do and where they fit in. The neck, tail, shanks and shoulders all allow you to see form and function (I particularly like cutting the string on a neatly butchered ring of oxtail and sorting the strong, broad bones from the tiny cartilaginous ones at the flicking end). Getting to know what a piece of an animal did can help us cook it appropriately. It is probably a generalisation to suggest that the more work a joint of meat had to do, the longer it will need to cook, but it is true that the hard-working shanks and neck will take longer to come to tenderness than the fillet, which never did a day’s work in its life. A chop from the loin will cook quicker than a chop from the ever-bending neck.

The butcher had some neck of lamb this week. This is a joint that gets much use – I have rarely seen a sheep that wasn’t eating. Awkward and lumpy, the neck is a cut to be valued for its cheap price, sweet fat and almost indestructible nature. The fact that I can make a fragrant, even luxurious supper out of something some people boil up for the dog makes me warm to it all the more. Tucked up in a heavy pan with earthy spices and sweet onions, the untidy lumps of meat can cook on a low heat for anything up to a couple of hours, its tough flesh and gristle breaking down to soft, spoonable meat and wobbly fat. Did I ever tell you my name is an anagram of lean gristle? Well, it is. I was slightly saddened this week to find the major supermarkets shunning this richly flavoured cut in favour of the neck fillet at over 12 quid a kilo. A decent butcher is always the best bet for the tougher cuts, until they become fashionable again like shanks.

As good as slow-cooked meat on the bone can be, it’s the gravy that forms in the pan that is the real prize. I invariably start with onions, but this time I am throwing the spice rack at them, with whole cumin seeds, ground coriander, a cinnamon stick and just a pinch of crushed chilli. The weather being as it is, I am keen to add some sweetness, and do so in the form of dried apricots, though it could have been figs or raisins.

Sometimes, I drop a few floury potatoes into a slow-cooked supper to bolster it up a bit and make it even more economical, but I am also tempted by other starchy fillers, such as couscous, barley and spelt. My starch of the moment is the fat, pearl-like mograbia, occasionally known as Lebanese or pearl couscous. It responds best to a spirited boil rather being steamed like the usual fine couscous. Some of the supermarkets sell it labelled as giant couscous, and it is easy to find in Middle Eastern grocer’s shops.

If mograbia remains elusive, then this rich, bargain-basement stew will feel just as comfortable with steamed fine couscous, quinoa or rice. I would add a little cinnamon to these, maybe some black pepper and some finely grated lemon zest and melted butter.

Braised neck of lamb with apricots and cinnamon

Something sharp to cut the fat is good here. Dried apricots have a pleasing tang that works well. Like cooking apples work well with pork. Neck of lamb is my first choice for this treatment, but I would also recommend small shanks. They are easier to get hold of. You may need to turn them once or twice during cooking, as they will sit proud of the sauce.

I usually reckon on at least 300g neck of lamb per person. This sounds quite a lot, but we are talking about one of the most bone-rich cuts of meat, so the quantity of meat should be just about right. The hands-on work is very straightforward.

middle neck of lamb: 1.25kg (8 pieces)

plain flour: 3 tablespoons

groundnut or olive oil: 2 tablespoons, plus a little more

onions: 2 medium to large

cumin seeds: 1 teaspoon

ground coriander: 2 teaspoons

crushed dried chilli: half a teaspoon or so

garlic: 2 cloves

fresh ginger: a 3cm lump

lemon zest: 2 strips, about 6cm long

a cinnamon stick

dried apricots: 250g

stock or water: 750ml

To serve:

chopped mint: 2 tablespoons

finely grated lemon zest: a teaspoon

Dust the lamb with the flour and season with salt and black pepper. Heat a couple of tablespoons of oil in a large, heavy-based casserole to which you have a lid. Add the lamb to the pan and let the pieces brown lightly on both sides. You will probably need to do them in two batches. Remove them from the pan, leaving behind any oil (if the oil has blackened, wipe out the pan and start again with fresh oil). Set the oven at 160°C/Gas 3.

Peel the onions and roughly chop them. Add them to the pan and let them soften for ten minutes or so over a moderate heat. Stir in the whole cumin seeds and ground coriander. Sprinkle in the dried chilli, adding a little extra if you want more warmth (I don’t think the dish should be hot, just warm and fruity). Peel the garlic and slice it finely, then add it to the onions. Peel the ginger, shred it finely and add it to the pan together with the lemon zest and cinnamon stick.

Add the dried apricots to the onions, then pour in the stock or water. Return the lamb to the pan, tucking it in amongst the rest of the ingredients. Season carefully. Bring to the boil, cover with a lid and place in the oven for one and a half hours, until the lamb is tender enough to come away from the bone easily.

As you serve, scatter the surface with fresh mint and lemon zest.

Enough for 4

Mograbia

Also known as giant or Lebanese couscous, the pearl-sized grains should be cooked till they are soft but retain a little bite, too.

half a cinnamon stick

mograbia: 250g

parsley: a few sprigs

a little butter, melted

a small lemon (optional)

Put a large pot of water on to boil (the mograbia likes to move around as it cooks, like pasta). Salt the water quite generously, as you would for pasta, and add the cinnamon stick.

Tip in the mograbia and leave to come back to the boil. Turn the heat down slightly, then let it simmer merrily for ten for fifteen minutes, till al dente, rather as you would like pasta to be.

Remove the parsley leaves from their stalks and chop them quite finely. Stir them into the melted butter, adding pepper and a little grated lemon zest if you wish. Drain the mograbia, discard the cinnamon stick, then toss in the melted butter and parsley. Serve with the braised lamb above.

FEBRUARY 12
The perfect marriage of smoked fish and cream

I am not especially fond of cream in main courses, but there are a few dishes in this book – rabbit with tarragon, gurnard with potatoes, pork chops with pears, to pick randomly on three – where it features with good reason. Tarragon is often overwhelming without the calming notes of dairy produce; a dose of double cream brings the fish and potatoes together; the pork dish uses the cream to deglaze the pan, giving the dish a velvety texture. The cream is not essential but it has a clear purpose.

Tonight I make the most of the masterful marriage of smoked fish and cream. Cream and smoke produce a calm and gentle partnership, working in dish after dish.

Smoked haddock with potato and bacon

unsmoked streaky bacon: 6 rashers

rapeseed oil: 3 tablespoons

medium potatoes: 400g

smoked haddock fillets: 500g

double cream: 500ml

bay leaves: 2

black peppercorns: 6

finely chopped curly parsley: 2 tablespoons

Cut the bacon into pieces roughly the size of a postage stamp. Warm the oil in a non-stick frying pan and add the bacon pieces, letting them colour lightly.

Cut the potatoes, without peeling them, in 1cm-thick slices, then cut each slice into short pieces, like tiny chips. Tip them into the pan with the bacon and fry for about fifteen minutes, until golden and cooked right through.

Meanwhile, put the smoked haddock into a pan with the cream, bay leaves and peppercorns. Bring almost to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer for fifteen minutes. Put the lid on and leave to infuse for five minutes or so.

Divide the potatoes and bacon between two warm plates, lift the haddock out of the cream and place a fillet on each plate. Stir the chopped parsley into the cream, then spoon it over the fish and serve.

Enough for 2

FEBRUARY 13
Sharing a pudding

Sharing comes naturally to me. It is, after all, at the heart of what I do. Writing down a recipe is a way of passing something you enjoy on to someone else. A gift, yes, but also a way to make a living. And whilst I like sharing plates of dim sum, tapas and boxes of chocolates (though I generally stop short of double-dipping), I find myself divided over the merits of sharing a pudding. Nothing makes my heart sink like a restaurant order of one pudding and four spoons. I have no wish to sound greedy but I would really rather everyone ordered their own.

At home, I can never make up my mind whether I prefer a large, dig-in type of pudding or an individual one. As much pleasure as can be had in doling out generous spoonfuls of trifle or steamed treacle pudding to a gathering of friends, family and assorted appetites, there is something rather delightful in having a tiny pudding all to oneself.

Today is cold and wet. A sponge-pudding kind of day. I make a cluster of little puddings with brown sugar and soft prunes that I soak in sherry. Baked not boiled, they turn out moist, caramel sweet, and cute and plump as cherubim. So much more charming than a whole one cut into portions.

Little prune puddings with caramel sauce

The accompanying brown sugar and cream sauce seems, at first, to taste rather sweet, but once it shares a spoon with the fruit pudding its inclusion is suddenly explained. I have used soft, ready-to-eat Agen prunes here but ready-to-eat dried apricots could be good too. I would suggest you use medium eggs rather than large ones, which may result in the mixture slightly bubbling over the top.

ready-to-eat Agen prunes: 10

medium-dry sherry: 2 tablespoons

butter: 120g

light muscovado sugar: 70g

caster sugar: 70g

eggs: 2, lightly beaten

self-raising flour: 120g

For the sauce:

light muscovado sugar: 50g

double cream: 250ml

Butter and lightly flour four 200ml pudding tins. Don’t be tempted to skip this step, otherwise your puddings may stick. Roughly chop the prunes and pour the sherry over them. Set aside. Set the oven at 160°C/Gas 3.

Cream the butter and sugars together till light and fluffy. Add the beaten eggs a little at a time (introduce a spoonful or two of flour if the mixture looks as if it might curdle), then gently fold in the flour.

Stir in the chopped prunes and any liquid. Divide the mixture between the pudding bowls – it should fill them by two-thirds – and bake in the pre-heated oven for forty to forty-five minutes, until springy and golden. To turn the puddings out, run a tiny palette knife around the inside of the tins, then invert them and shake firmly.

For the sauce, put the sugar and cream in a saucepan, bring to the boil and simmer for two minutes. Serve with the puddings.

Enough for 4

Chicken with potatoes and dill

A mild treatment for chicken, with soft flavours. Steamed rice, possibly brown basmati, would work nicely here.

butter: 30g

olive oil: a tablespoon

a chicken, jointed into 8 pieces

small chestnut mushrooms: 250g

small potatoes: 400g

cider: 500ml

double cream: 150ml

a small bunch of dill

Melt the butter in a casserole and add the oil. When it starts to sizzle, put in the chicken pieces. Season with salt and pepper, then leave to cook over a moderate heat until the chicken is pale gold on both sides. Remove from the pan and set aside.

Halve or quarter the mushrooms, depending on their size, and add them to the pan. Let them soften, adding a little more butter or oil if necessary. Scrub and halve or quarter the potatoes. Add them to the pan and leave till lightly coloured, then pour in the cider. Return the chicken to the pan and bring to the boil. Immediately the liquid is boiling, lower the temperature so that it simmers gently.

Cover with a lid and leave to cook for thirty minutes or until the chicken is cooked right through. Check by pushing a skewer into the thickest part; if the juices run clear, then it is done.

Remove the chicken. There will be a lot of liquid. Turn up the heat and boil to concentrate the flavours, letting the quantity of liquid reduce by about a third. Stir in the cream and the chopped dill, then season to taste. Wait for a minute or two, then remove from the heat and serve.

Enough for 4

FEBRUARY 17
A can of butter beans

There are some who turn their noses up at a can of beans. As indeed I do on occasions, when I am in the mood for soaking, draining, boiling, skimming, testing, draining, cooling and dressing dried beans. But a can or two of butter beans (or the oval, green flageolet; tiny, bead-like haricot; or white cannellini, the dragée of the bean world) has got me out of jail more times than I can shake a wooden spoon at.

Rinsing the beans will rid them of the slimy canning liquor but it is best done under a softly running tap if you are not to mash them to a watery hummus. Butter beans are the meatiest of the canned beans, the ones you can roll over in your mouth like the golden toffees in a tin of Quality Street. They are similar to, but not quite the same as, the delicious lima beans that are so popular in the US.

I wouldn’t argue with those who say a lovingly made bean bake, simmered and then cooked in a low oven, is better than the quick canned-bean supper I made tonight, but I am not after perfection here, I’m after something good to eat following a long day at my desk.

Butter beans with mustard and tomato

onions: 3

garlic: 3 large cloves

olive oil: 3 tablespoons

thyme: a few sprigs

bay leaves: 2

crushed tomatoes (or tomato passata): two 400g cans

butter beans: two 400g cans, drained

medium chillies: 2, deseeded and chopped

black treacle: 2 tablespoons

grain mustard: a tablespoon

smooth French mustard: a tablespoon

Peel and roughly chop the onions and garlic, put them in a heavy-based casserole with the olive oil and cook over a moderate heat till they are soft and pale gold. An occasional stir will prevent them sticking to the pan.

Add the thyme, bay leaves, tomatoes, drained beans and 250ml water and bring to the boil. Season with salt and black pepper and stir in the chillies, treacle and mustards. Partially cover with a lid and leave to simmer gently for thirty minutes or so, until the sauce has thickened a little. Serve hot.

Enough for 4

FEBRUARY 18
Little cakes – getting a good start

It is the creaming together of the butter and sugar that tends to get overlooked by those new to cake making. Yes, the raising agent – baking powder or self-raising flour – plays an essential part in the texture of your cake, but the amount of time you give to the initial creaming should never be underestimated.

The right beater helps. A wooden spoon and elbow grease will work, but things have moved on, and a machine of some sort will give a quicker and frankly better result. A hand-held electric beater or an electric mixer has the power to produce a vastly superior mixture, where the sugar and butter are whipped up into something resembling soft ice cream, like an old-fashioned Mr Whippy.

Little cakes are a good place to start. Individual cakes are usually better-natured than a larger, family-sized sponge, and any shortcomings can be more easily masked. Not for nothing the success of the ubiquitous buttercream-crowned cupcake.

I’m guessing here, but I suspect the world doesn’t need another cupcake recipe, which is why I set about making something with a little more heart and soul. A cake with a backbone, not to mention an interesting texture, which comes from rolled oats and dried apricots. It’s as near as I can get to giving you a cupcake recipe.

Little apricot and oat cakes

You will need about 16 paper muffin cases and a couple of muffin trays or tart tins to hold them.

butter, at room temperature: 225g

golden caster sugar: 225g

eggs: 3

dried apricots: 160g

self-raising flour: 225g

chopped mixed candied peel: a tablespoon

the grated zest of an orange

rolled oats: 3 tablespoons

a little demerara sugar

Set the oven at 180°C/Gas 4. Put the butter into a food mixer with the sugar and beat together until light and fluffy. The mixture should be pale, almost the colour of double cream. Break the eggs and beat them lightly, just to break them up, then beat them into the butter and sugar mixture a little at a time. Chop the apricots in a food processor till they resemble fine orange grit.

Add the flour to the cake mixture, through a sieve if you wish, stirring gently with a large metal spoon until no flour is visible. Stir in the chopped apricots, peel and orange zest.

Divide between the paper muffin cases, scatter with the oats and a good pinch of demerara sugar and bake in the preheated oven for twenty to thirty minutes, until risen (they may sink slightly in the centre) and golden brown.

Makes about 16

FEBRUARY 19
The beauty of kale

When it is touched with frost, it is hard to picture a leaf so beautiful as kale, even more than a nasturtium with morning dew caught in its veins. But there is more to it than that. The frost will sweeten the strident notes of the brassica, just as it does with sprouts and parsnips.

Cabbage and pork is an age-old marriage that I am still finding new versions of. Brussels sprouts, fried and tossed with bacon and cream, was a recent one; white cabbage with crumbled black pudding; a salad of sprouted broccoli and shredded coppa. All variations on a theme that works brilliantly. Chorizo has a spiciness that goes nicely with kale but, more importantly, it has great pearls of fat that will work the same magic with the dark, bitter leaves as sausages do for sauerkraut and streaky bacon does for Brussels sprouts.

Kale with chorizo and almonds

Good-quality cooking chorizo is not the cheapest of meats but I find a little goes a long way. When this recipe was first published in my column I was asked why I suggested discarding the oil, especially as it contains so much chorizo flavour. A good point, but I felt there was enough fat in the dish already. So the suggestion is just that. Leave the spicy, orange, liquid fat in, if you wish.

curly kale: 250g

soft cooking chorizo: 250g

skinned whole almonds: 50g

a little groundnut or sunflower oil

a clove of garlic, peeled and crushed

Wash the kale thoroughly – the leaves can hold grit in their curls. Put several of the leaves on top of one another and shred them coarsely, discarding the really thick ends of the stalks as you go.

Cut the chorizo into thick slices. Warm a non-stick frying pan over a moderate heat, add the slices of chorizo and fry until golden. Lift them out with a draining spoon on to a dish lined with kitchen paper. Discard most of the oil that has come out of the chorizo (better still, keep it for frying potatoes) and wipe the pan clean. Add the almonds and cook for two or three minutes, till pale gold, then lift out and add to the chorizo.

Warm a little oil in the pan, add the crushed garlic and shredded greens and cook for a couple of minutes, turning the greens over as they cook, till glossy and starting to darken in colour. Return the chorizo and almonds to the pan, add a little salt and continue cooking till all is sizzling, then tip on to hot plates.

Enough for 2 as a light main course, 4 as a side dish

FEBRUARY 20
The pancetta question

Modern cookbooks, mine included, are awash with pancetta – to start a sauce, flavour a soup, add protein to a leaf salad or simply give depth and savour. But could we not use bacon?

Though both bring a similar note to a recipe, pancetta has a few advantages over bacon. Most bacon in the UK is sold in rashers, while pancetta is more often found in useful cubes (often labelled as cubetti), which give more body to a sauce than strips of wafer-thin bacon. Most cures are less salty than our own back or streaky, and seem to have a faintly herbal note to them. (In practice they don’t, but most pancetta is more subtly aromatic.)

It is this subtlety that makes pancetta more suitable for so many recipes. It tends to become part of the backbone of a dish, rather than intrude as bacon can occasionally do. But that is not all. The reason it is so often specified over bacon is that it is a more consistent product. Suggest chopped bacon for a recipe and you can get any one of a hundred different cures, ranging from pale and watery to deeply smoky and dry. Although there are most certainly differing qualities of pancetta available, it is by and large consistent and therefore a safer bet.

A block of pancetta bought from an Italian deli will keep in decent condition in the fridge for a week. Bacon rashers less so. I regard a lump of the stuff, dirty rose pink in colour, thickly ribbed with white fat, as one of the kitchen essentials – like lemons, Parmesan and olive oil. A meal it does not make, but the difference it adds to even a few lettuce leaves or a bowl of soup is extraordinary. Today’s bean and spaghetti soup is a case in point.

Pancetta and bean soup with spaghetti

The one good thing about having little in the larder is that it prompts experimentation.

pancetta in the piece: 175g (you can use pancetta cubetti at a push)

a little olive oil

garlic: 2 small cloves

chopped tomatoes: two 400g cans

chickpeas or other large, firm pulses: a 400g can, drained

spaghetti: 250g

parsley: a small bunch

extra virgin olive oil

Chop the pancetta into small pieces, then fry for a minute or two in the olive oil over a moderate heat. Once the pancetta starts to turn golden, peel and crush the garlic and add to the pan, followed by the chopped tomatoes, 400ml water and the drained canned chickpeas or beans. Bring to the boil and season with salt and black pepper. Lower the heat so that the mixture simmers gently, thickening slowly, for about fifteen to twenty minutes.

Break the spaghetti into short lengths and boil in deep, generously salted water for eight or nine minutes, till tender, then drain. Roughly chop the parsley and stir into the soup together with the spaghetti. I add a trickle of really good olive oil to each bowl at the table.

Enough for 4

FEBRUARY 21
A family cake

Don’t you just hate lining cake tins? I know you don’t have to any more with the ready-made paper liners available from cookware shops, but they have the habit of making everything come out looking like a shop-bought cake.

The truth is that cakes rarely stick round the sides, and if they do they can be loosened with a palette knife (run the knife smoothly around the edge, pressing firmly against the side of the tin, without digging into the cake). I now line only the base, cutting a simple disc of brown baking parchment or grease-proof paper to fit the base of the tin. It takes thirty seconds, stops the cake attaching itself to the base and leaves your handiwork looking homemade.

An apricot crumble cake

This is the grown-up version of the little cakes I made a week or so ago (see here). A family cake, suitable for tea or dessert, in which case it will benefit from an egg-shaped scoop of crème fraîche.

dried apricots: 250g

softened butter: 175g

golden caster sugar: 175g

eggs: 2

ground almonds: 80g

self-raising flour: 175g

ground cinnamon: a pinch

vanilla extract: a few drops

For the crumble:

plain flour: 100g

butter: 75g

demerara sugar: 2 tablespoons

jumbo oats: 3 tablespoons

flaked almonds: 2 tablespoons

a little cinnamon and extra demerara sugar for the crust, and perhaps a little icing sugar to finish

Preheat the oven to 160°C/Gas 3. Line the base of a 22cm round cake tin with baking parchment.

Put the apricots in a saucepan, cover with water and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for twenty minutes, then turn off the heat and leave them to cool a little.

Beat the butter and sugar in a food mixer for five to ten minutes, till light and pale-coffee coloured. Break the eggs, beat them gently just to mix the yolks and whites, then add them gradually to the mixture with the beater on slow. Fold in the ground almonds, flour and cinnamon, then add the vanilla extract. Scrape the mixture into the tin and smooth the surface.

Drain the apricots and add them to the top of the cake mixture. Make the crumble topping: blitz the flour and butter to crumbs in a food processor, then add the demerara sugar, oats and flaked almonds and mix lightly. Remove the food processor bowl from the stand and add a few drops of water. Shake the bowl a little – or run a fork through the mixture – so that some of the crumbs stick together like small pebbles. This will give a more interesting mix of textures. Scatter this loosely over the cake, followed by a pinch of cinnamon and a little more demerara. Bake for about an hour, checking for doneness with a skewer; it should come out clean.

Remove the cake from the oven and set aside. Dust with a little icing sugar if you wish and slice as required. The cake will keep well for three or four days.

Enough for 8

FEBRUARY 23
Desperate for dessert

There are apples that fluff up when they are cooked and apples that keep their shape. But you know that, if you have read the apple chapter in Tender Volume II, or indeed have ever made apple sauce or baked an open apple tart.

What I find particularly useful are recipes that work with ‘fruit bowl’ apples, the sort you tend to have knocking around. This is such a recipe. It’s a pudding for when you didn’t intend to have a pudding, until someone asked for one.

Fried apples with brown sugar and crème fraîche

The apples should be cooked over a fairly low heat so they soften but don’t colour too much before you add the sugar. Once the sugar is added, things happen quite quickly, so don’t be tempted to take your eye off the pan. The Calvados is a suggestion. You can add a straightforward cognac if you prefer, or leave it out altogether. If there is no crème fraîche around, use ordinary double cream – though the result will be a little sweeter.

a large apple

a little lemon juice

light muscovado sugar: 2 tablespoons

butter: 50g

Calvados: 1 tablespoon

crème fraîche: 2–3 tablespoons

Cut the apple into quarters and remove and discard the core and pips. I don’t peel my apples for this recipe, but it is up to you. Cut the apple into thick slices, put them in a basin and squeeze over a little lemon juice, just enough to stop them browning.

Melt the butter in a shallow, non-stick pan. Add the apple slices and let them cook over a moderate heat for about ten minutes, turning them as necessary and lowering the heat if they colour too quickly. When they are soft and golden, scatter over the sugar and let it melt in the butter. As it starts to turn to caramel in the pan, add the Calvados and crème fraîche. Once the cream has melted around the apple, serve immediately.

Enough for 2

Pumpkin, tomato and cannellini soup

This is quite a substantial soup and could easily double as a main dish. To make a quick version, use canned beans. Drain them of their canning liquid and rinse them thoroughly, then add them to the soup once the tomatoes have simmered down to a slush. You could use any bean, but the cannellini type has a good contrast of texture to the soft vegetables and tends to stay quite firm during cooking. The soup can be kept in the fridge for several days.

dried cannellini beans: 250g

onions: 2

olive or rapeseed oil: 2 tablespoons

garlic: 2 or 3 cloves

rosemary: a small sprig

tomatoes: 400g

pumpkin: 800g (about 650g prepared weight), peeled and cut into chunks

parsley: a small bunch

a little extra virgin olive oil

Soak the dried beans in cold water overnight. Drain and rinse, then tip into a large, deep pan and cover them with water. Bring to the boil, partially cover with a lid, then turn down the heat so they cook at an enthusiastic simmer. Don’t be tempted to add any salt at this point, as it will toughen the beans. Skim off any froth that rises to the surface as they cook, and occasionally check the water level and top up from the kettle if necessary. Test for doneness after forty-five minutes or so; they should be tender but not soft. Drain and set aside.

Peel and roughly chop the onions. Warm the oil in a deep pan, add the onions and cook for about ten minutes, until soft. While the onions cook, peel and slice the garlic and add to the pan, together with the rosemary needles, roughly chopped. Cut the tomatoes in half and stir them into the onions. Continue cooking for five minutes, then pour in 750ml water and bring to the boil. Add the pumpkin pieces to the pan, season with salt and black pepper and leave to simmer gently for thirty to forty minutes, until the pumpkin is tender to the point of a knife.

Tip the drained beans into the pan and continue cooking for ten minutes. (If you want to cool everything at this stage and put the soup in the fridge overnight, it will be all the better for it.) Remove the leaves from the parsley and chop roughly, then stir them into the soup. Ladle into deep bowls, trickle a little extra virgin olive oil over the top and serve.

Enough for 4

FEBRUARY 24
The old wok

I have three woks. The oldest is cheap, thin, and has been a friend for longer than I can remember. A purchase from Chinatown, now blackened from years of use and, if I am honest, a little rusty here and there. Its diameter is 40cm, which will make a stir-fry (mushroom and broccoli, prawn and fat, fresh noodles, chicken and choy sum) for two.

The trendy thick woks with famous names are rubbish. Leave them in the shops. Never pay more than a few quid for a wok. Go for one made from steel no thicker than a ten-pence piece. It will take more looking after (it needs seasoning to stop it rusting) but it will reward you with a better stir-fry. The whole point of a stir-fry is the speed at which the meat cooks. A slow stir-fry where the pan is too thick or the heat too low simply isn’t a stir-fry. It’s a stew-fry.

Woks will eventually season themselves. They will develop a surface patina of burned-on oil that will be both non-stick and non-rust. I speed the matter up by putting a new wok, coated in groundnut oil, into a hot oven and leaving it for an hour or so for the oil to burn on. I then wipe the surface with kitchen paper without washing it and let the wok cool. I sometimes do this several times, depending on the progress. If the wok has a wooden handle, then it’s a case of doing it on the hob. A smoky business.

Oyster sauce, in particular the Lee Kum Kee brand, is one of the sauces that are always present in my fridge. Dark, velvety and not as fishy as it sounds, it keeps in good condition for a few weeks. Its destination is usually a last minute stir-fry – tonight, one of cubes of pork, too much garlic and some mushrooms. As a simple supper, it is difficult to beat.

Pork with garlic and oyster sauce

Plus greens somewhere.

flavourless oil: 5 tablespoons at least

cubed pork shoulder or fillet: 350g

garlic: 3–4 cloves

shallots: 2

small, hot red chillies: 4

mushrooms, shiitake, chestnut, whatever: 150g

oyster sauce: 3 heaped tablespoons

Shaoxing wine: 3 tablespoons

Heat the wok. Add 2 tablespoons of oil. When it starts to smoke, add half the meat and let it colour, removing it as it turns golden at the edges. Repeat with the second batch of meat, using a little fresh oil if you have to.

Meanwhile, peel and finely chop the garlic and peel and slice the shallots. Finely chop, but do not seed, two of the chillies. Leave a couple whole to add a deeper, subtler flavour. Get the wok hot, pour in the remaining oil and let it start to smoke, then add the chopped garlic, shallots and chillies, stirring as they cook. Fry them for a minute or two till they start to colour. Add the mushrooms, whole or torn up if they are large. Continue stir-frying till they are soft and lightly coloured, then return the meat to the pan. Once the meat is thoroughly hot, stir in the oyster sauce and the wine and bring to the boil. Let the resulting sauce reduce for a minute, maybe two, then serve.

Enough for 2

FEBRUARY 25
In the squeezing of a lemon

A warm lemon will yield more juice than a cold one. So it is better to keep them at room temperature than in the fridge. More importantly, a ripe or even slightly overripe fruit will give up more juice than one so hard you can barely squeeze it. Many lemons are sold unripe. A ripe lemon is often a deeper yellow, and yields gently under pressure. I roll my lemons on the work surface before juicing them, pushing firmly down on them with the palm of my hand. I seem to get even more juice that way.

The standard domestic glass lemon squeezer, the one with a moat to catch the juice and tiny beads to hold back the pips, works well enough. The deeper, stainless steel versions are good too, letting the juice fall through into the base. Yet I get the best results with a wooden lemon reamer. The simplicity appeals, a pointed ridged cone with a beech or olive wood handle, and the fact that it has been made by hand rather than machine. Some are made from one piece of wood rather than two (the handle is often made separately from the ridged cone). But what sets it apart from the others is its simplicity and, in some cases, its beauty. Of course, the pips escape into the juice. You simply fish them out with your fingers.

Lemon tart

The tart case needs to be made with care, so the edges don’t shrink as they cook, otherwise it will leak once the filling goes in. I keep a little bit of pastry aside for patching, so that if any cracks or gaps appear I can patch them before I add the lemon custard.

For the pastry:

plain flour: 180g

butter: 90g

caster sugar: a tablespoon

a large egg yolk

a little water

For the filling:

eggs: 4, plus 1 extra egg yolk

caster sugar: 250g

zest of 2 unwaxed lemons

zest and juice of a small blood orange

lemon juice: 160ml

double cream: 180ml

Make the pastry: put the flour into a food processor, add the butter, cut into pieces, and blitz to fine breadcrumbs. If you prefer, rub the butter into the flour with your fingertips. Add the sugar and egg yolk and just enough water to bring the mixture to a firm dough, either in the machine or by hand. The less water you add, the better – too much will cause your pastry case to shrink as it bakes.

Tip the dough on to a floured board, pat it into a round, then roll it out a little larger than a 24cm loose-bottomed tart tin. Lift the pastry carefully into the tin, pushing it well into the corners and making certain there are no holes or tears. Trim away any overhanging pastry, then place in the fridge for twenty minutes.

Set the oven at 200°C/Gas 6. Put a baking sheet in the oven to heat up. Line the pastry case with foil, fill with baking beans and slide it on to the hot baking sheet. Bake for twenty minutes, then remove from the oven and carefully lift out the beans and foil. Return the pastry case to the oven for five minutes or so, until the surface is dry to the touch. Remove from the oven and set aside. Turn the oven down to 160°C/Gas 3.

Make the filling: break the eggs into a bowl and add the egg yolk and caster sugar. Grate the lemon and orange zest into the eggs. Pour in the orange and lemon juice. Whisk, by hand, until the ingredients are thoroughly mixed, then stir in the cream.

Pour the mixture into the baked tart shell and slide carefully into the oven. Bake for thirty-five to forty-five minutes till the filling is lightly set. Ideally, the centre will still quiver when the tray is shaken gently.

Enough for 8

FEBRUARY 26
A little meal of peace

Sometimes, I rather like noise. The testosterone-fuelled roar of a football match heard from my back garden; the tired and blissfully happy sounds of a crowd singing along at a festival; the swoosh of a barista’s steam wand. But most times I prefer peace and quiet. The sound of snow falling in a forest is more my style – something I have yet to hear this year.

There is quiet food, too. The tastes of peace and quiet, of gentleness and calm. The solitary observance of a bowl of white rice; the peacefulness of a dish of pearl barley; running your fingers through couscous. The thing these have in common is that they are grains or something of that ilk. What is it about these ingredients that makes them so calming? Could it just be that they bring us gastronomically down to earth, show us how pure and simple good eating can be? This is food pretty much stripped of its trappings. It is, after all, the food that many people survive upon.

The peacefulness of grains, their earth tones and the fact that they don’t snap or crunch between the teeth, is what makes them food to eat when we are looking for solace and calm. The fact they are not from a dead animal probably has something to do with it, too.

More and more, I make a main course of what is generally thought of as an accompaniment. Tonight, I make a dish of pale bulgur wheat, cooked with chopped onions, bacon, mushrooms and dill. It is a bit of a hybrid (pork and bulgur are not often found sharing a plate) but it turns out to be one of those ridiculously cheap meals that hits all the right notes.

Bulgur and bacon

I sometimes spoon a little seasoned yogurt – salt, pepper, paprika – over this at the table, stirring it into the grains. But mostly I leave the pilaf as it is, enjoying the warm, homely grains and juicy nuggets of mushroom as they are.

smoked streaky bacon: 200g

onions: 2

olive oil

garlic: 2 cloves

small mushrooms: 250g

bulgur wheat, medium fine: 250g

boiling water from the kettle: 400ml

sprigs of parsley: 3–4

dill: 6 sprigs

butter: 60g

Cut the bacon rashers into short, thick pieces. Peel the onions and slice them thinly. Warm a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large, shallow pan over a low heat, add the sliced bacon and stir occasionally till the fat has turned pale gold. Peel and finely chop the garlic. Add the onions and garlic to the pan and leave till soft, golden and translucent, stirring from time to time.

Quarter the mushrooms and add them to the softening onions. Leave them to cook for five minutes or so, with the occasional stir. Add the bulgur with a pinch of salt, then pour in the boiling water. Cover tightly, switch off the heat and leave for fifteen minutes.

Roughly chop the parsley leaves and dill. Lift the lid from the pan and add the butter, herbs and a little salt and pepper. Stir till the grains are glossy with butter, then serve.

Enough for 4

FEBRUARY 27
Coconut cream

One of the reasons I have stayed put for more than a decade is because of the way this house floods with light in the mornings. Softened by closed blinds, the sun that comes in from the east wakes you gently, if a little earlier than you would like. This morning, the rooms fill with honeyed light, like a Hammershoi painting. I suddenly realise how much I have missed it these last few weeks.

Sunlight, even on a relatively cold day, has a habit of changing my appetite. Pasta, potatoes and grains feel inappropriate and heavy. The brown food that has provided such homely comfort on the grey days since the year’s start suddenly looks out of place.

Coconut is one of those ingredients that tend to walk hand in hand with sunshine. It smacks, albeit softly, of trips to Kerala and Thailand, of tiny scented pancakes for breakfast on sun-filled terraces, of lime juice and chillies and, of course, sun-tan oil. All of which is about as far as you can get from a February day within a ball’s throw of Arsenal Stadium.

I met coconut first in the form of a neat, sweet Bounty bar, and as a coating, along with raspberry jam, for the tiny, castle-shaped sponges we wrongly called madeleines. Later, it became the principal seasoning of a holiday in Goa and then, a decade on, of the deep, pale-green soups of Thailand. For an ingredient of which I am not particularly fond, the flesh of the coconut is laden with happy memories.

The finely desiccated coconut that covered my childhood like snowflakes, on everything from jelly mushrooms to fairy cakes and marshmallows, has never set foot in my adult kitchen. It is a flavour I seem to have left behind, like a school blazer that no longer fits. I keep coconut in two forms: as a can of creamy, brilliant-white milk for soups and curries and as coconut cream, a thicker, more concentrated version made from the top of the milk. This latter form is useful when you want the flavour of the nut without introducing too much liquid. Spiked with ground cumin, cardamom and turmeric, it makes a simple marinade for prawns or chicken. It comes in jars and small cans, like the mixers on the drinks trolley of a plane, and is not to be confused with ‘cream of coconut’ whose principal use is in a rum-spiked piña colada.

Coconut cream is the thick, almost paste-like gloop that rises to the top of the pot when coconut milk is produced. You can make your own by adding water to shredded, fresh coconut, bringing it to the boil and letting it cool. On refrigeration, the cream will rise and can be scooped off.

As well as introducing a nutty sweetness, coconut cream works as a balm. I often add the contents of a small can to knock the edge off an exceptionally spicy lamb curry, or indeed to any dish in which I have misjudged the chilli quotient and left everyone breaking out in a sweat.

Chicken wings with coconut cream

You could serve this with plenty of the brick-red, coconut-scented sauce and some steamed rice, but I prefer to reduce the sauce over a high heat, stirring almost continuously to prevent it sticking to the pan, till it is thick enough to coat the chicken wings.

groundnut oil: 2 tablespoons

chicken wings: 16 (or 12 large ones)

fresh ginger: a 60g knob

garlic: 2 large cloves

ground chilli: half a teaspoon

ground turmeric: half a teaspoon

ground coriander: a teaspoon

small ‘new’ potatoes: 250g

chopped tomatoes: a 400g can

coconut cream: up to 320ml

coriander leaves: a small handful

Warm the oil in a deep frying pan. Season the chicken wings with salt and pepper, add to the pan and leave them to colour on both sides. Remove to a plate once they are golden brown.

Peel the ginger and garlic and blitz them to a rough pulp in a food processor. Blend in the ground chilli, turmeric and coriander. Cut the potatoes into thin ‘coins’. Return the empty chicken pan to a moderate heat and add the spice mix from the processor. Once it starts to sizzle and its fragrance rises, add the potatoes and 200ml water. Continue cooking, with the occasional stir, for ten minutes or until the potatoes are approaching tenderness. Stir in the tomatoes, bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes.

Pour in the coconut cream (start with 160ml, then add more as you wish). Season with salt, stir well, return the chicken and any juices on the plate to the pan and leave to simmer for fifteen to twenty minutes, allowing time for the liquid to reduce a little. Turn up the heat and, stirring almost continuously, let the sauce bubble till it has thickened considerably. Scrape away at the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon as you go to stop the sauce sticking. It should be thick and should easily coat the chicken. Stir in a little chopped coriander, if you wish.

Serve in shallow bowls or deep plates and, being best eaten somewhat messily with the hands, provide something for everyone to wipe their fingers with.

Enough for 4

FEBRUARY 28
Hand to mouth

I have always regarded mopping food from my plate with a piece of bread as one of life’s better moments. No doubt it is made twice as enjoyable by the fact I was forbidden from doing it as a child. Those last few puddles of sauce sponged up with anything from a wodge of floury bap to a jagged shard of warm pitta form a natural conclusion to my day’s cooking, a form of delicious closure. Given half the chance, I would be happy to transfer an entire meal from plate to mouth in pieces of warm bread.

Any soft dough, flat or bun-like, can be used to scoop sloppy, spicy or stew-like things from our plates. Yes, the bread adds substance to our supper, but the real point – for me at least – is the tactile pleasure to be had from holding the hot sauce in a piece of damp bread. It feels as good as it tastes. More than just an edible receptacle with which to trap our food, the bread, saturated with juices, becomes part of the dish – more than you can say for a knife and fork.

I sometimes make flatbreads at home, the kind of slipper-shaped breads you can split and stuff, or tear into rough pieces to dunk into taramasalata, puréed chickpeas or chunkily textured tomato sauce. They are perhaps my favourite of all for cleaning my plate. The most straightforward is a flour, yeast and water dough rolled into small ovals and baked. They often leave the oven crisp, so in order to make them soft enough to wipe a plate, I cover the warm breads with a tea towel, which leaves them suitably pliable.

Today I made a sort of gloopy stew with chickpeas and tomatoes, sharpened with pickled lemon, leaving them to cook long enough to make the juices thick and rich. To introduce a bit more depth, I roasted the tomatoes first, tossed around with a chopped ripe pepper and a few cumin seeds, adding a deceptively smoky quality. Just the stuff for a bit of bread.

Chickpeas with tomatoes and harissa

A vegetable-based stew to serve with rice or bread.

tomatoes: 800g

red peppers: about 500g

olive oil: 110ml

red wine vinegar: 3 tablespoons

cumin seeds: a teaspoon

chickpeas: two 400g cans

preserved lemons: 60g

harissa paste: a teaspoon

basil leaves: a handful

soft, Middle Eastern-style bread, to serve

Set the oven at 200°C/Gas 6. Remove the tomatoes from their stalks, cut each into six and put them in a baking dish. Cut the peppers in half, tear out their stalks and seeds, cut the flesh into short chunks, then add to the tomatoes.

Add 75ml of the oil, plus the vinegar, cumin seeds and a generous grinding of black pepper and sea salt. Roast for fifty minutes to an hour, until the peppers are tender and the tomatoes are soft and juicy. If the edges have caught slightly, then all to the good.

Transfer the tomatoes and peppers from the baking dish to a saucepan. Drain the chickpeas of their canning liquor and rinse them under the cold tap. Mix the drained chickpeas with the tomatoes and peppers.

Chop the preserved lemon, discarding the soft inner pulp. Stir the harissa, chopped lemon and remaining olive oil into the chickpeas, place the pan over a moderate heat and leave to simmer for ten minutes or so, till it is thoroughly hot and juicy. Season with salt and coarse black pepper.

Fold the basil leaves, whole, into the mixture, letting them wilt in the heat. Transfer to a serving dish and serve with warm bread.

Enough to serve 4, generously, as a main course

A spurtle, some oats and a beautiful bowl

I have been using my spurtle the wrong way round. This came to light last year, when I took a porridge-making lesson with Ian Bishop in Carrbridge, Scotland. This morning, under a beautiful, grey-white winter sky, Ian’s softly spoken words come back to me.

A spurtle, spirtle, theevil or, as it used to be known in Shetland, gruel-tree, is a thick wooden stick purely for stirring porridge in its pan, and seems like one piece of kit too many, especially to someone with a pathological dislike of unnecessary gadgets. But the gentle sound of warm oats and water being stirred in a thick pan on a freezing morning is a noise of ancient comfort, like the soft crackle of an open fire in an old hearth. I have loved porridge since I was a boy, but my mother made it with milk and sugar whereas I make mine with water and salt.

Ian taught me to use three cups of water to one of pinhead oats. I use the same oats as him now, an organically grown medium oatmeal, and only slightly less salt. He insisted, politely, on a teaspoon of salt to a cup of oats, and I follow his lead, aware that it is almost my entire salt ration for the day. Just as it does in a batch of flapjacks, the salt brings out an almost toasted flavour in the oats. I stir them clockwise only, lest the devil get me, and embellish them with cream and a dark berry jam such as blackcurrant, just as my teacher does.

A bowl of porridge is a quiet breakfast (no snap, crackle or pop) that sets me up for the day. I feel a sense of calm and wellbeing after a breakfast of porridge. I should add that mine now comes in a wooden bowl. I regard my porridge bowls as some of the most beautiful items in my kitchen. They are made by Guy Kerry at his croft in the Black Isle, with ash wood from a tree blown down in a storm.

The recipe is straightforward, and I owe it entirely to Ian. I bring three cups of water to the boil, pour in a cup of medium pinhead oatmeal in a steady flow (let it fall in a steady rain, is how Marian McNeill puts it in The Scots Kitchen), stirring all the time in a clockwise direction. It is done in five minutes, no longer, a scant teaspoon of salt added in the last minute of cooking. As it slides into the wooden porridge bowls, I spoon in a smudge of damson or blackcurrant jam and, if there is any around, some cold single or double cream, avoiding the temptation to write my initials with maple syrup. Tradition prefers us to stand. I hope that leaning against the kitchen sink isn’t going to induce the wrath of the devil.

March

MARCH 2
The cast-iron casserole

A casserole is a cooking vessel rather than the food cooked in it. Nevertheless, the word has come to mean a thick, sloppy stew cooked in a covered pot. I’m no pedant and that is fine by me. Once under the ownership of the frugal home cook, such recipes are now standard gastropub fare, and in particular those involving lamb shanks.

The shank, no longer the cheapest of meats, is the hard-working cut from the top of the front leg. The muscles and sinews of the shank can soften or tighten as the mood takes them, so it is best cooked slowly, in liquid, and in a low oven. Frustratingly, the flesh can fall easily from the bone or not, so exact timing in a recipe is almost impossible. They may need an hour or three. Of course, modern cooks demand a recipe that is done in the time it states, but with the lamb shank we must enter a different mindset, one where something is done when it feels like it, not when a recipe says it should be.

Size isn’t necessarily an issue, but the smaller the shank, the quicker it may come to tenderness. No guarantees though; I have met the odd tough little bugger before now. Covering with a lid or foil will help the meat to steam as well as bake, which should encourage it down the path towards tenderness. But the most likely way to guarantee your meat falling from the bone in a sinewy, velvety mound is to sink it in plenty of liquid – stock, wine, cider, whatever. Just keep the meat covered. This is no mean feat with a large shank, so regular turning during cooking is essential to keep as much of the flesh covered for as long as possible.

I have several casseroles – by which I mean the pots, not their edible contents. A couple are scarred from bean-based recipes forgotten in the oven (chickpeas leave bubblewrap-type rings on the base; cannellini the sort of snow you get on an untuned television screen), whilst many have cream or grey linings that have taken on the hue of red wine sauce. That’ll be boeuf bourguignon, or perhaps oxtail. There is a beautifully understated matt-black one, solid cast iron, which I use for stock and occasionally for a breadcrumb-topped stew. If I were a different sort of cook, it would have been used like those in Castelnaudary, the French home of cassoulet, with its bits of pork, goose and beans. But mine gets used for macaroni cheese, chicken casserole with tarragon and potatoes and, today, a heart-warming dish of lamb shanks cooked with thyme, garlic, onions and black-eyed beans, or other beans if you wish. The sort of recipe that looks as if it took days to make, that warms like no other and makes you feel like a real cook. Whatever one of those may be.

Lamb shanks with black-eyed beans

I say black-eyed beans, but you could use haricot beans or chickpeas if that is what you have to hand.

dried black-eyed beans: 500g

bay leaves: 2

olive oil

lamb shanks: 4

onions: 3

thyme: 4 small sprigs

garlic: 4 plump cloves, finely sliced

plain flour: 4 lightly heaped tablespoons

stock or, at a push, water: 750ml

For the crust:

fresh white breadcrumbs: 150g

a handful of chopped parsley

olive oil

Soak the beans in cold water overnight to plump them up. The next day, drain and rinse them, then bring to the boil in deep water, together with the bay leaves and a good glug of olive oil. Boil hard for ten minutes, then reduce the heat so they simmer merrily till they are just tender yet retain their shape and some bite – a matter of thirty to thirty-five minutes or so. Drain the beans in a colander and set aside.

Season the lamb shanks and lightly colour them in a little oil – 2 tablespoons should do – in a heavy-based casserole. Once they are pale gold, remove them, but leave their cooking fat behind. Peel the onions, cut them in half and then cut each half into thick segments. Let these soften in the pan over a medium heat, adding a little more oil if there is less than a couple of spoonfuls of fat left. As the onions soften, add the thyme sprigs and the garlic. When all is soft and translucent, stir in the flour and leave to colour lightly for two or three minutes. Gradually stir in the stock to make a thick, oniony sauce. Set the oven at 180°C/Gas 4.

Tip the drained cooked beans in with the onions, then tuck in the lamb and any juices from the plate and season with salt and black pepper. Simmer for thirty minutes, partially covered with a lid, stirring from time to time to check the beans are not sticking. Add more stock if you feel it needs it, then remove from the heat.

Mix the breadcrumbs and parsley with 3 or 4 tablespoons of olive oil, then scatter them over the top of the casserole. Cover loosely with foil, transfer to the oven and cook for an hour and a half or until the meat can be persuaded to part company from its bones. Remove the foil and cook for a further ten to fifteen minutes to let the crust crisp up.

Enough for 4

Getting passion fruit right

The passion fruit offers us the crunch of a hundred seeds, a dab of golden jelly surrounding each one and a little (very little) piercing saffron juice. Sour, sweet, soft, crisp, the passion fruit gives us a hit of bracing freshness to brighten a grey day.

The dark, spherical fruit is most usually sold unripe – that is, completely smooth, a dull purple mauve, either in packs of four from the supermarket or loose in a cardboard box from the greengrocer’s. Keep them till the skin has thinned and its surface is covered with dimples, like a golf ball. Like us, the passion fruit is better for a few wrinkles.

As your fruits progress towards ripeness, their skin will shrivel and become a little brittle. Though small, they should feel heavy for their size. Lightness is generally an indication of dryness within. Catch it before the casing collapses on one side, which is the fruit’s last gasp.

Eaten too early, the passion fruit has an astringency that will remind you of the pomegranate, and the juice will be watery and pale. Kept till ripe, it will give you intense fruit flavours and bright, clean, fresh-tasting juice and seeds, to be eaten first thing on a cold morning, with a teaspoon, like a boiled egg. A little cup of sunshine.

This morning the greengrocer has a box of them that are spot on (I have a feeling they were about to be thrown out). I get them cheap and use their knife-sharp juice to make tiny pots of golden cream no bigger than espresso cups. Just four or five teaspoons per person with which to end tonight’s dinner.

Passion fruit creams

passion fruit: 16

double cream: 500ml

caster sugar: 150g

lemon juice: 35ml

Cut the passion fruit in half and scrape out the seeds and juice into a small sieve balanced over a measuring jug or bowl. Let the juice from the fruit drip through, then rub the seeds against the sieve with a teaspoon to get as much of the pulp through as you can. Set the juice aside in a cool place and reserve the seeds for later.

Put the cream and caster sugar in a saucepan and bring to the boil, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar. Lower the heat and leave to bubble for three minutes, stirring from time to time. Put the lemon juice in a measuring jug and make the quantity up to 75ml with the reserved passion fruit juice. Keep the remaining juice cold.

Remove the cream mixture from the heat, stir in the lemon and passion fruit juice and leave to settle for a few minutes. Pour into 6 or 8 espresso cups or very small glasses. I like to stir a few of the reserved passion fruit seeds into the mixture for a contrast in texture (say, half a dozen per cup) but that is up to you. Cool, then refrigerate for at least a couple of hours.

Just before you serve the creams, spoon a little puddle of the passion fruit juice over the top. As each diner digs in with their teaspoon, the juice will trickle down into the depths of the cream.

Makes 6–8 espresso cups

MARCH 6
Beans on toast again

Being compiled from my dog-eared, chaotic notebooks rather than a meticulously kept and chronologically perfect diary means that many of my everyday meals, those I tend to do almost on autopilot, rarely get their fifteen minutes in the limelight. This is a shame because they are often jolly good eating.

Such meals tend to get taken for granted, like very close friends. One of my favourite quick fixes has always been beans on toast. I like the sweet commercial sauce and the thick toast, which, just for the record, I always butter. The joy of richly sauced beans and hot toast is not confined to the turquoise tin though, and I often make a home-made version, with cans of beans that I put in my own sauce, stirring in bacon, mushrooms or whatever is to hand (chorizo and black pudding are favourite additions).

Today, even with my woolly hat on (I now have three, and every one of them makes me look as stupid as the other), the biting-cold wind is making my ears numb. The idea of going home to sweet, sticky beans with a wodge of warm sourdough bread appeals more than almost anything I can think of. I could cop out with my mate Heinz, embellishing them with chilli or Marmite, or even a bit of bacon, but instead decide to take an extra thirty minutes to make a down-home version. It does the trick.

Beans on toast

A little more trouble than opening a can, but much more satisfying when you have the time.

lardons or cubed bacon or pancetta: 200g

an onion

a little rapeseed or olive oil

a rib of celery

carrots: 2 small to medium

chopped tomatoes: two 400g cans

canned beans (pinto, haricot, butter beans etc): two 400g cans

black treacle: 1 teaspoon

a lump of sourdough loaf

Fry the lardons in a deep pan over a moderate heat. Peel and roughly chop the onion. When the lardons and their fat are golden, add the onion, together with a little rapeseed or olive oil if there seems too little fat in the pan. Chop the celery and carrots, add to the pan and leave to cook for a full five minutes, till fragrant and starting to soften. Add the tomatoes, simmer for ten minutes, then stir in the drained beans and simmer for another ten minutes. Season with the treacle, a little black pepper and some salt.

Warm the bread in the oven, tear into chunks and serve with the beans.

Enough for 2

MARCH 7
A tropical marinade and a shoal of sea bass

For some time now I have been curious about glass, and why some is more beautiful to look at, and look through, than others. Windows made from old ‘crown’ glass have soft waves and little bubbles, like tiny seeds to catch the light, while drinking glasses that are uneven in the hand, with ripples and furrows, make the water within sparkle. Small things, but they matter to me. I like drinking water from a hand-made tumbler with dimples and folds.

Aesthetics aside, glass is a useful object in the kitchen because it has a neutral effect on the food we put in it. Unlike aluminium, glass is unaffected by acid ingredients such as rhubarb, lemon and vinegar. Leave a batch of poached rhubarb in a glass bowl and it will taste the same after a night or two in the fridge. Use aluminium and your fruit will have taken on an unpleasant taint from the dish. It is one of the reasons glass has been used for centuries for storing acid-based preserves such as pickles and relishes.

I also use glass to marinate meat and fish. Not only is it non-reactive but you can see the changes taking place in the food more easily. Make a ceviche in a glass dish and you can see whether the fish has turned opaque from the lime juice. I can’t be the only person who finds measuring liquid in a glass jug more accurate than in one made from china. I particularly like making the classic lemon surprise pudding in a Pyrex bowl so I can see the distinct layers of sponge and lemon sauce.

Today I work on a recipe for a television programme for next Christmas (such is the life of a cookery writer). It is not my recipe, but comes via The Rebel Dining Society. It’s fresh, clean, smart and uses up the rest of the passion fruit.

A ceviche of sea bass and passion fruit

passion fruit: 4

limes: 2

an orange

a vanilla pod

sea bass fillets: 4

a red chilli

a small yellow or orange chilli

chives: 4 or 5, snipped into short pieces

coriander leaves: a small handful

Squeeze the juice of the passion fruit, seeds and all, plus the limes and the orange into a bowl. Scrape in the seeds of the vanilla pod and mix gently.

Skin the sea bass fillets, then cut the flesh into thin slivers and arrange them neatly on a large plate or in a glass bowl. Pour over the juice, almost submerging the fish. Scatter over very fine slices of red and yellow chilli and cover the plate with a piece of cling film. The sea bass will be ‘cooked’ by the acidity in the dressing, so leave in the fridge for a good three or four hours or even overnight. Scatter the chives and coriander leaves over the fish and serve.

Enough for 4 as part of a light lunch

MARCH 8
A jar of capers

The door of the fridge holds many treasures, but mostly rows of opened jars. Today the list is typical: a bottle of Vietnamese chilli paste, a block of tamarind, two packets of butter, a tube of harissa paste and another of wasabi, a bottle of damson gin and a jar of damson jam, two opened jars of marmalade, four bottles of tonic water, a bottle of apple juice I use for my breakfast smoothies, a bottle of Vietnamese fish sauce and another of rice wine, four bottles of sparkling Norwegian mineral water and a jar of salted capers. Of course, the capers don’t need refrigerating, but the oversized fridge has become the modern-day larder.

Capers generally come in brine or salt. The latter is considered to be better, mostly because the capers are plumper and, although salty, the seasoning stays on the outside and can be washed off – unlike the brined version, where the capers soak up the salt-water solution like little sponges. Their qualities of sourness and salt tend to polarise people, but they are without doubt one of the most used seasonings in my kitchen, finding their way into sauces for steak and fish, a dressing for many a salad, and tossed with warm, partially melted butter for a pasta sauce.

The caper is the cook’s first call for piquancy. Bitter, sharp and salty, it has the ability to bring out the flavour of any ingredient it is partnered with. A dull nugget that makes other flavours shine. Generally, I suggest a caper is only warmed, never cooked, as it can become inedibly bitter, though once it is dunked in a pool of tomato sauce on a pizza the average caper is probably fairly safe.

The caper is a flower bud, pickled or salted before it becomes a small, creamy-white flower. Italian ones are probably the best known but they are grown in Morocco and Turkey too. Caper berries, incidentally, are fatter than capers – almost the size of an olive – and are eaten with their stalk, with a distinctive crunch to them. They are the fruit of the caper bush that is produced after the buds have flowered.

Despite all the culinary partnerships that intrigue or delight, there are very few that actually make the mouth water. Mouthwatering, that overused term that I have banned from any piece of writing or programme that bears my name, is a particular horror of mine, like the word ‘crispy’. Yet occasionally the word is accurate, such as when it is used to describe the partnership of capers with lemon. A recipe for culinary fireworks. The two have almost magical powers when they appear with fish.

Sea bass with rosemary and capers

sea bass: 2 small ones, cleaned

new potatoes: 500g

olive oil

rosemary: 4 bushy sprigs

a long, hot red chilli

sherry vinegar: a tablespoon

capers: a tablespoon, rinsed

the juice of a small lemon

garlic: 2 cloves

parsley: 4 large sprigs

a lemon, to serve

Set the oven at 200°C/Gas 6. Rinse the fish and wipe them dry with paper towel.

Peel the potatoes, then cut them into slices about the thickness of a pound coin. Warm a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large, shallow pan or roasting tin set over a moderate to low heat and slide in the potatoes. Let them cook slowly until their edges are starting to colour – a matter of ten minutes. It is worth stirring them and turning them over now and again, so they don’t stick to the pan.

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