Tomatoes on toast

Just in time for the August bank holiday

No matter how appalling the weather has been for the rest of the year – how many barbecues have been rained off and festival goers covered in mud, you can guarantee it will always be hot and sweaty during the last weeks of August. Because the last weeks of August are when we cook Christmas dinner, and, presumably to punish us for being so previous with his son’s birthday celebrations, God likes to play a little joke.

The joyous occasion came to pass last week. While everyone was sunning themselves in parks, I was shoving a roast turkey in the oven and blanching as the idle meat thermometer on the side read 38C. And then we lit a fire. And after a few days of this sweaty festive ordeal, the very last thing I wanted to do was come home to a hot dinner. So I suppose it’s God’s way of mitigating his hilarious heat wave timing by making sure that all manner of gorgeous, refreshing vegetables are in season right now.

For those in London, if you only go to Borough market once a year, it should be in August. The stalls are riots of the most divine fruit and veg, piled high, soft, succulent and ripe. It’s absolutely mesmerising. On escaping from the office winter-wonderland in search of an antidote for supper, I was utterly spoiled for choice, but came to rest on the heritage tomato table in Turnips. My god. Row upon row of plump, glossy tomatoes, watermelon striped, primrose yellow, huge red Coeur de boeuf, and elongated San Marzano. Completely ignoring the price tag, I filled bags with the most unusual I could find, took them to the counter, then nearly had a heart attack. On a cautionary note everyone, when being seduced by vegetables in Borough market, always look at the price tag. My haul worked out at approximately £1 per tomato. Hmm. Needless to say I balked, went to remove them, remembered all those mince pies and meekly handed over my card, grabbing a sourdough baguette before scuttling away.

Tomatoes on toast has to be one of the simplest, but most delicious meals on the planet. But you have to have good tomatoes, and while £10 for two people might be a little excessive, when you’ve spent all hot summer day steaming Christmas puddings and making pigs in blankets, it seems worth it. We ate them with a very cold bottle of Viognier, and finished the meal off with fresh figs and a tiny goat’s cheese crottin drizzled with honey. Not a stuffing ball in sight…

Tomatoes on toast for two - hardly a recipe, but worth knowing anyway

Around 600-700g ripe mixed tomatoes, roughly chopped

4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1shallot, finely chopped

drizzle sherry or red wine vinegar

pinch caster sugar

2-6 slices (depending on size) sourdough baguette or similar crusty, chewy bread, toasted

1 garlic clove, halved

sea salt and black pepper

handful basil leaves

Mix the tomatoes with 3tbsp of the extra virgin, the shallot, the vinegar (proceed cautiously and keep tasting) and the sugar (ditto). Leave it to sit for 15 minutes so the flavours mix. Rub the bread with the cut side of the garlic clove and place on two plates. Season the tomatoes generously last minute (the salt draws the liquid out of them so do this as late as possible) and taste again. You may find you need a little more vinegar after you’ve added the salt. Toss the basil leaves through and tip on top of the bread, finishing with a final drizzle of olive oil. Serve immediately, preferably outside.

If you like, you can add a few shavings of good Parmesan over the top, but I think it’s just as gorgeous unadorned.

Pork belly

As soon as people find out what I do the first thing they invariably always ask is ‘So what’s you signature dish then?’ My usual response to this is a heavy sigh, a slightly bored expression and a ‘well I don’t really have one, I’m always cooking different things’. But recently, I’m actually starting to think that I do have a signature dish. And I think it might be pork belly. So apologies to all those I’ve sighed at recently.

Pork belly, or belly pork as it was called before it became fashionable, was seen as being wildly uncouth about 15 years ago – I remember my family of butchers loving it, but we were about the only ones, and it was dirt-cheap. Now, it’s on just about every restaurant menu, and it’s normally not done properly at all. They don’t cook it long enough, or they try and jazz it up by removing the skin and cooking it separately until it’s that horrible, dried-out bubbly consistency that just falls apart in your mouth. Proper crackling should make you ever so slightly concerned for your teeth, but still be irresistible.

Although the price has gone up recently with its rising popularity, it’s still a lot cheaper than most other meat – a free-range belly at my local butchers is about £9.50 a kilo, and 3kg will feed up to eight people, depending on greed. It’s my go-to dish for having people over  – it’s utterly low-maintenance and everyone (me included) gets absurdly excited about the crackling.

You’ll see a lot of recipes that only tell you to cook it for a couple of hours, but for me, 5 is the absolute minimum. The thing that tends to turn people off about pork belly is the quantity of fat you have to wade through to get to the meat, but long, slow cooking melts almost all of this out, and what you’re left with is meat so tender it falls off its bones, and a rich, intense sauce (I hate the word jus, but I suppose that’s what it is), that you can spoon straight from the pan.

I add flavourings according to what I’m cooking for the rest of the meal. A while ago I rubbed harissa all over the underside before cooking, and before that it was jerk seasoning. This weekend, though, I wanted to serve affogato and ricciarelli for pudding, so I decided to go down the Italian route, with sage, garlic and lemon. Another huge bonus of cooking this for friends is that it’s so rich, all you need with it is a big, sharp salad, and some potatoes chopped small, tossed with olive oil and then roasted until golden. I’m absolutely allergic to cooking side dishes last minute, so anyone who’s been for dinner at my house will probably be nodding in recognition right now. That is, unless they came for Sunday roast. I’m not a total philistine.

And a quick word on salad. While it may seem like the easy option, you can still make it fabulous – just think about what the meat needs to complement it. I did raw fennel, watercress, radish and little gem – crunch to balance the softness of the pork, heat from the radish and watercress to counteract its sweetness, and a sharp French vinaigrette to balance the richness.

My last point, and I know you already know this, but don’t you dare buy rubbish pork – quite apart from the pig having had an awful life, the meat and skin will be inferior, which means you won’t get lovely crackling and it won’t taste nearly so good. Rant over. Enjoy…

Slow-cooked pork belly with sage, lemon and garlic

This amount fed four of us with some leftovers, but could easily have fed five, and still had leftovers.

2kg piece free-range pork belly, bone-in and skin scored (your butcher will do it, unless you’re handy with a Stanley knife*)

Small bunch sage, leaves removed and finely chopped

3 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped

zest 1 lemon

2tbsp olive oil

About 2/3 bottle white wine (don’t worry too much about quality – I used Stowell’s…)

1. Heat the oven to 130C (110C fan). Turn the pork belly over so it’s skin side down, and with a sharp knife cut down along each rib about half way into the flesh – no deeper. Mix the sage, garlic, lemon zest and olive oil together and season very well, then rub this all over the underside of the meat, pushing into the cuts. Line a roasting tray with foil, sit the pork belly skin side up and push the foil up around it so it forms a smaller tray. Pour the wine into this – it should come about 11/2 cm up the side of the meat. Pat the skin dry with kitchen roll, scatter sea salt over and into the scores and cook in the bottom of the oven for 5 hours. Check periodically – it will shrink quite a lot, and as it does, keep pushing the foil closer into it to protect the outside meat.

2. After this time, remove the pork from the oven and turn your oven up to as high as it will go (I normally go for about 240C). Pour off the juices that will have collected in the foil and set aside. Close the foil up around the meat so only the skin is exposed, and return it to the top of the oven, then cook for around 20-25 minutes checking to see it’s not burning, until the skin is crisp, dark golden and slightly bubbled. Remove, making sure to enjoy the sound of it audibly crackling, transfer to a board and rest for 10 minutes, then slice down along the ribs, (this is easiest if you take the crackling off first) and serve with salad and potatoes. Skim most of the fat off the cooking juices and you have a ready-made sauce. Any leftovers can be kept for 2-3 days, pulled into shreds and reheated to make an excellent sandwich.

*Truefoodie accepts no responsibility for you getting ahead of yourself and slicing your finger off with a Stanley knife

The rise of the tenuous celebrity chef

It has seemed of late, that when a celebrity has reached ego satiety from tv, film or tabloid, they will do one of two things. They will either enter Celebrity Masterchef, or they will write a cookbook. If it’s the former, then I will sigh in a slightly superior manner and take the opportunity to loathe Gregg Wallace a little more, but if it’s the latter, there will normally be anything from a slight hiss to a positive spit of rage.

Because who do these people think they are?

Ker-ching…

Take Sophie Dahl. Actually born Sophie Holloway, she opted to take her maternal surname (cannot imagine why), and has so far published two cookbooks with accompanying tv series. She’s a contributing editor for Waitrose Kitchen. I can’t argue with the fact that she can write (given her pedigree it’s hardly surprising), but can she cook? Uhhhm, no. Not really. Oh, you cry, but she went to Ballymaloe! And? Thousands of people have been to Ballymaloe, but that doesn’t make them equipped to teach the nation how to eat. It seemed to me that the main content of her first book was the flouncy introductions to her recipes, urging you to eat them by candlelight, your head resting on your beloved’s chest as soft piano music tinkled in the background. Did she mention she’s married to Jamie Cullum? And once your head is full of romantic notions of eating dimly lit prawn curry on top of a short jazz musician, are you actually going to notice the recipe is only really flavoured with curry powder? Obviously not, as some bright spark commissioned a second book.

And Gwyneth Paltrow. Just because she named her child after a fruit, it doesn’t mean we all want to eat her macrobiotic muffins. Stick to acting Gwynnie, it’s a rare gift for an American to produce a convincing British accent. Fay Ripley attracted my ire when she announced that she wanted to write a book to teach people how to feed their families. Well, that’s a lovely sentiment Fay, but why you? Do you have any authority on cooking? No? Oh, Cold Feet? Well, carry on then.

The latest offering to irritate me afresh is Gok Wan. The simpering lifestyle coach is about to appear in his own Channel 4 tv series about Chinese cookery, with a sparkly book to match. His credentials? Alright, they’re better than some, his father owned a Chinese restaurant. But looking through his book, there are almost as many pictures of him gurning with noodles, gurning with rice, gurning with potstickers as there are recipes. And do I really want someone with such a complex history with food telling me what to cook? I’m not sure I do.

Look good eating that naked and I might be impressed.

Now, you may rubbish me for having extreme professional jealousy, and to a certain extent you’d be right. It’s unbelievably frustrating watching talentless celebrities doing utterly predictable things with chicken, when it’s taken a lot of training and hard work to make me think I have any form of authority about cookery. It seems that because cooking is something that most people do, they feel entitled to share their opinions on it, and if they’re famous, this can mean globally. But it takes real skill to write a successful recipe, which most don’t have, and the upshot is a raft of failed dinners and disappointed consumers who were sucked in by the ‘Look, just look! You too could have my life if only you buy this book!’ of it all.

And before you judge any further, I have absolutely no jealousy towards the truly wonderful food writers and chefs that we’re also fortunate enough to have advising us – Nigel Slater, Diana Henry, Lucas Hollweg, Simon Hopkinson being just a few of my favourites. These people know their stuff, and you can trust their judgement implicitly because they’re not just in it to satisfy some whim for recognition in a different field to their norm.

So the next time Sophie Dahl looks like convincing you to eat something under the boughs of a blossom tree, or Gwyneth makes you think sugar is evil, or Gok Wan so much as opens his mouth, steel yourself, turn away and look to a respectable cookbook. Or, you know, you could always check out one of my recipes…

A rather wonderful salad

I may have mentioned this before, but I’m completely addicted to Vietnamese food. Milder, but just as intensely flavoured as Thai, and nowhere near as cloying and sticky as Chinese, it is a perfect combination of flavours – freshness from lime, herbs and chillies, depth from slow-cooked stocks and sticky marinades, and texture from crisp leaves and toasted nuts.

With my Hipstamatic

 Luckily, I seem to have imprinted my obsession onto the boy, who now requests this salad approximately once a week. Apart from it being completely delicious, it’s a break from the Pret sandwiches and frozen pizzas that seem to be the standard fare of one studying for financial exams. Plus it’s an excuse for him to eat an unholy amount of Sriracha.

Although the ingredients list is quite extensive, it’s really not hard and is perfect if you’re in the mood to faff around in the kitchen, wine in hand and music playing. This generally suits me best on a Friday night, when the results can be eaten in front of the telly. Occasionally straight from the bowl.

The ingredients here are my favourites, but by no means law, so mess around as you see fit. One thing I would insist on though is that you use carrot and cucumber – without their pickled crunchiness the salad loses a large part of its charm, and do try and find unsalted peanuts – cashews just don’t have the same impact. If you want to bulk it out a little more you can add 300g straight-to-wok udon noodles, tossed in a hot frying pan for a couple of minutes with a little oil, but even without them, it’s surprisingly filling.

Oh, and make lots. Between two of us we can usually polish off enough for 4, but it’s almost completely fat-free, and gorging yourself on veg really isn’t a big deal. Any leftovers are great for lunch the next day too – just keep some herbs and nuts back to add a touch of freshness. I sound like a Lenor advert don’t I?

...And looking slightly more refined.

Vietnamese chicken salad with peanuts and ginger

So much greater than the sum of its parts

Serves 4

Prep time: 40 mins

• 3 medium carrots
• 1 large cucumber
• 1/2 white cabbage, shredded
• ½ red onion, very finely sliced
•  3 free-range chicken breasts
• 2 star anise
• chicken stock to cover
• 3 garlic cloves, bashed and peeled
• thumb size piece sliced ginger
• 2 little gem lettuces, shredded
• 100g unsalted peanuts, toasted
• large handful each coriander and mint leaves, roughly chopped
• 2 red chillies, deseeded and finely chopped

for the dressing

• 4tbsp each fish sauce, sweet chilli sauce and rice vinegar
• 11/2tbsp finely grated root ginger
• juice 2 limes, plus extra wedges to serve

 1 Make the dressing by mixing all the ingredients together. Using a veg peeler, peel the carrots and cucumber, then drag it lengthways to make long ribbons of the flesh. Stop when you get to the lighter centre of the carrot, and the seeds of the cucumber. Toss these through with the white cabbage and red onion then pour over 2/3 of the dressing. Set aside – the dressing will gently pickle the veg.

2 Put the chicken breasts in a saute pan with the star anise, chicken stock, garlic cloves and ginger. Heat gently until the odd bubble is rising to the surface, cover and cook for around 20 minutes – don’t let it boil or you’ll dry out the chicken. Remove the chicken from the liquid, allow to cool slightly then shred. Keep the stock – it makes great noodle soup.

3 Toss the chicken through the veg with the little gem and most of the peanuts, herbs and chillies. Pour over the rest of the dressing, toss everything together, then scatter over the remaining nuts, herbs and chillies and serve with the extra lime wedges, and lashings of chilli sauce (optional…).

Why does my food taste average?

I’m sure this has happened to most of us. You’ve eaten something somewhere, you’ve managed to get hold of the recipe, you follow it to the letter, but it just doesn’t taste as good. And why does that starter from the Hawksmoor cookbook not fill you with the joy it did when you ate it at Hawksmoor? What is Ottolenghi doing that you’re not? And HOW does the meringue roulade in the magazine look so wonderfully crispy and light, when yours looks more like a slug?

It's all about the beating

Well, it could be almost anything – different ingredients, wrong season, complete lack of talent, but here are some of the more obvious ones that a trained chef will do without thinking, but you might be surprised to read…

Seasoning

Now I know I harp on and on about this, but there’s a reason I’m writing it first. Seasoning is the building block of cookery – without salt, your food will taste bland. Period. If you’re cooking with meat, you should always season it while it’s still raw, before it’s even seen the heat. It will make a huge difference to the flavour that just can’t be achieved after it’s cooked. And remember to season everything, even down to salad dressing. My idea of a pinch of salt is a four-fingered pinch so be bold, buy some Maldon and throw it about with gusto. And take heart, my blood pressure is absolutely fine.

Onions

Don’t rush your onions. They’re nature’s sloths, they like to do things in their own good time. If a recipe tells you to cook onions until caramelised, it’s safe to say you’re going to be waiting for at least half an hour, maybe longer if you’re doing a big batch. Cook them low and slow, and use plenty of butter. Caramelised onions form the flavour base for so many dishes, and if you rush the beginnings, the finished product will never taste as good.

Garlic

Burnt garlic will taint an entire dish, so treat it with respect. If you’re putting it with an onion base, add it only a couple of minutes before you add the rest of the ingredients – it doesn’t need as long as an onion to cook, just a few minutes to take the raw edge off. Never add it to really hot oil, it will burn instantly and smell of sulphur. For a dish like garlic prawns or mushrooms, add it finely chopped just before you serve – the heat from the food will soften it, and it will taste perfect.

Stock

This one is make or break, the difference between a masterpiece and a finger painting. If you’re cooking anything that lists stock as a main ingredient (a broth, a rich casserole, a gravy), you need to use the proper stuff. Either you can make your own, by roasting bones then cooking them slowly covered in cold water brought up to a gentle simmer with onions, bay, carrots, celery and peppercorns for about 3-4 hours, or you can buy the fresh ones from supermarkets. Heston’s from Waitrose is fantastic, well worth the cash and a gorgeous dark colour. The M&S ones aren’t bad either, and if you’re really stuck, the Touch of Taste bouillon bottles are ok too. But use fresh if you can, if only just to make me happy.

Ingredients

This is basically a common sense issue, but it stands to reason that some asparagus that’s come over from Peru in the dead of winter is not going to taste as good as a freshly picked spear from Kent in May. If you’re confused about what’s in season when, there are tons of websites you can look at (my favourite being this one from River Cottage). Also make sure you’re buying the best you can afford of the everyday stuff. Value Cheddar isn’t going to be a patch on the mature farmhouse stuff. Although this works both ways – for example, cheap mozzarella is better than buffalo for pizzas – the buffalo goes watery – you want the rubbery brands for cooking, save the good stuff for eating raw.

Meat

This needs a whole post to itself really, but please please always buy the best meat you can afford. Battery farmed chickens, grown super quickly with hormones taste bland, slimy and dry. And then there’s all the welfare issues. Anyone who thinks chicken or pork are tasteless has obviously been buying the budget packs, and if you find your cottage pie or lasagne has a slightly rancid taste, it’s probably because you used cheap mince. With meat, you get what you pay for, so find your nearest Q-Guild butcher, and start up a beautiful relationship with him.

Beating

Don’t get too excited, I’m talking about with a whisk. As you know from my cake post, butter and sugar needs a lot of beating to realise its full potential, but beating is equally important for other puddings. For example, your meringues should be beaten to firm peaks before adding any sugar, and even then it should be added a tablespoon at a time, and the mixture beaten well in between each spoonful. It incorporates as much air as possible, and breaks the proteins down in the egg white so your meringue will be more stable while cooking. And if you think that sounds like too much effort, just think of all the good it’s doing your bingo wings…

 

 

 

 

Any questions answered

During what seemed like an entire lifetime spent on a rickety old bus yesterday with some friends, I found the conversation turning, as it often does, to food – and the inevitable ‘how do you…’ questions started coming out.  As my doctor friend finds she’s constantly asked ‘what’s this on my arm?’, ‘Is that normal?’, ‘does it always look like that?!’, so I find people ask me about all sorts of cooking problems. And since I too have been known to text Dr Davey the odd query or two, rather than queue up for the GP, I feel it’s my duty to answer them as best I can. But in order to save time in the future, I thought I would write a few of the most common ones down here, so that hopefully next time something cocks up in the kitchen, you’ll know where to come.  So…

I’ve made something too salty

First of all, well done for seasoning – so many people don’t nowadays and it makes their food taste so unpalatable. But if you really have overdone it, apart from the old tricks like adding a raw potato (NB. This only works with liquid based dishes like casseroles and soups) to suck up the salt (remove before serving), try adding some acidity. Salt and acidity cancel each other out – so some lemon or lime juice, or a splash of vinegar should help the problem. If  you don’t want to add it directly to your dish, serve a salad with a strong vinaigrette on the side, and hope people have the good sense to eat them both at the same time. And if all else fails, supply lots of water and keep quiet. Most people need to drink more of it anyway.

I’ve burnt the bottom of my casserole

We’ve all done this – maybe you got sidetracked by the telly, or maybe you were trying to fit too much in one pan and couldn’t stir it properly, but the telltale scrape of the wooden spoon on the bottom of the pan is always a moment of panic. Don’t. Stop scraping, remove as much of the food as you can to a different pan, and bin anything that looks burnt. Hopefully you noticed before the situation turned drastic, and it will all be ok.

I don’t know if my fish is cooked

If you’re cooking a whole fish, ask the fishmonger to leave the dorsal fin on. When a whole fish is cooked you’ll be able to pull it out easily. If you have to tug, it needs a bit longer.  If you’re using fillets, you should stop cooking as soon as the fish turns from translucent to opaque and when it just begins to flake. If you notice white gunk seeping out you’ve gone too far – the proteins start to break down when it overcooks, and that’s the white stuff.

Can I do anything to stop onions from making me cry?

I’m afraid the answer to this is not really – although many people will come up with old wives’ tales about spoons in your mouth and running water. I’ve never found the running water trick works, the only thing that gives me any slight relief is putting them in the fridge for a few hours before cooking – I think it’s something to do with slowing down the enzyme that reacts with your tears, but the scientists out there may shout me down. Whatever, it works for me, sort of. Or there’s always the old ski goggles, but apart from looking ridiculous you might find that the lenses confuse your depth perception and you end up chopping your finger off. Then you really will cry.

Why didn’t my ice cream freeze?

Done a batch of homemade ice cream? Got a bit liberal with the rum for the raisins? Rounded up the sugar volume? That’s probably why. Sugar and alcohol don’t freeze (think of that syrupy bottle of vodka in your freezer). Ice cream recipes have to balance out the ratio of liquid to sugar and booze (if it’s in there), so you get the correct consistency, so try not to go all Michel Roux on it. If you think the recipe needs something else, then add it as a topping or a syrup – you’ll get the same effect when its eaten. And remember that the cold kills a lot of flavour, so your raw ice cream mix should taste very strong before you freeze it.

Of course, drizzling extra syrup on is never a bad thing

My meringues always crack/weep

Both of these problems are generally because you’ve cooked them on too high a temperature. They crack because a crust forms before the inside is cooked so you get an air pocket between the shell and the inside, and when you remove them from the oven the shell collapses with nothing to hold it up. If they weep (they will have brown bubbles of syrup around the base), it can also be because you cooked them on too high a temperature – melting the sugar and making it seep out, or that you cooked them for too long, which splits the mixture. If you’re worried about your oven, buy an oven thermometer to check it’s running correctly.

So that’s a few of the basics covered, and you can click on the links for cake problems or pastry tips. If anyone has any more, please email them to me – it would be nice to have this as a regular thing – a cookery 101, if you will. Plus it makes me feel like all my mistakes were not made in vain, which is always a nice feeling…

Consumer Research

Having recently been handed a load of research into recipe related search terms in google, I was quite surprised by what came up as being the most searched for. I knew chicken recipes would feature quite highly, as would pasta. But omelette? Ratatouille? Waldorf salad?! Does no one remember Fawlty Towers? It’s CELERY, APPLES, WALNUTS, GRAPES! In MAYONNAISE! Clearly people are cooking at home, but they’re not always cooking what I thought they were.

For instance, in the chicken recipe category butter chicken features rather highly up the scale above, for example, chicken and mushroom pie. But who, in all honesty wants to see first hand the volume of saturated fat that goes into butter chicken?! Once you’ve stepped through the frosted glass doors of The Bombay Star, you’ve made the decision that calorie content is not an issue that evening, but stirring rivers of butter into your supper is a different matter entirely. And it wasn’t just this takeaway staple that was high up the list – korma, masala, jalfrezi were all up there, along with chicken chow mein and lemon chicken from the Eastern contingent. Is there a whole generation of internet users who are trying to recreate the curry house and Chinese at home?

Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t make curries – in fact, I’m pleased that so many people want to make curry, because it’s not the easiest thing to make.  It requires time, patience, and a list of ingredients as long as your arm. We’re constantly concerned that people only want quick, on-the-table-before-you’ve-got-your-coat-off type food (Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals out-selling The Bible would suggest they do). But if people want to cook curry, then we clearly have nothing to worry about. And we have tons of curry recipes on the website, but we try very hard to make sure they’re not the sort of dishes you would get in your local tandoori.

I think this is where food writers are on a bit of a sticky wicket. We’re forever looking for the ‘twist’. You can’t do a roast chicken, everyone’s had roast chicken, you have to do roast chicken with sumac. Or anchovies. Or, oh I don’t know, plums? But what about just a plain old roast chicken recipe?

And lasagne. In my working life I’ve done recipes for lasagne with meatballs, lasagne with spinach and mushrooms, a gratin that looks suspiciously like a lasagne, and lasagne with Fontina and butternut. Should I have just done one with ragu, béchamel and mozzarella? I assumed most people would know how to make that, but then, if you only ever do a twist, how could they?

Lasagne or gratin? You decide.

So what would you like to see? Should we be re-inventing the wheel every month, or keeping it simple? What about a little bit of both? If we’re going to attract all types of cook then there has to be a balance, but if you’re a confident cook, would you get irritated by seeing an omelette recipe taking up space? I’d love to hear people’s thoughts. And maybe their lasagne recipes…

Cooking with nuts

If you were to go looking through my hopelessly overcrowded freezer at home, you might be surprised by the number of packets of nuts in there. First, if you didn’t know that nuts could be frozen, they can, and second, I have so many of them because they’re so incredibly versatile. Think of any dish, and I could probably find a way of working nuts into it. Toasted macadamias tossed through a salad. Ground-up walnuts to thicken a Persian chicken stew. Chopped hazelnuts stirred through pasta with fried courgettes, or whole almonds coarsely ground in a fragrant orange blossom cake.

Nuts provide protein, natural fat, flavour and texture – they’re nature’s powerhouses that, unlike many superfoods, taste fantastic. I don’t think I’d be sprinkling goji berries liberally all over my supper. Alright, they’re not the cheapest adornment to your cookery, but they make such a difference, I really think it’s worth forking out for them. A Vietnamese salad loses a large part of its charm without its scattering of toasted peanuts, and I just don’t see the point of fruit cake if it’s not blanketed in sweet, sticky marzipan.

Of course, you’ve got to treat them properly. As a general rule nuts always taste better when toasted – it brings out the natural oils and gives them a rounded, less raw flavour. There are several ways to achieve this – you could place them in a dry pan and roll them around to stop them catching. This is the easiest option, but there’s a pretty large chance they’ll burn on one side. You could put them in a roasting tin in a medium oven for 10 minutes, which will toast them more evenly all over. If you’re going down this route, set a timer as I guarantee you’ll forget about them and they’ll end up black. Or, if you’re using them as a garnish and not an ingredient, you could heat a little oil in a frying pan and toast them in that – the oil distributes the heat so you get an even toasting, and also adds flavour.

If a recipe calls for them to be ground in a food processor, take care not to get carried away – whiz them too finely and you’ll push all the oil out which will leave you with a sticky lump instead of beautiful, fine crumbs. And always let them cool after toasting before grinding, to avoid the same thing happening.

Recipes using ground almonds, will be more delicious if you grind your own, rather than buying pre-ground. Doing it yourself means you can toast them first, and  control how far you take them  – leaving them mainly ground but still with a bit of texture will give you a cake with more bite and texture, and adding a couple of drops of almond extract will really enhance the flavour. As a general rule, you can substitute between half to 2/3 of a cake’s flour content for ground almonds, but add half a tsp of baking powder to the mix to counterbalance the heaviness.

 If you’re keeping open packets of nuts for longer than a few days, be aware they’ll go stale pretty quickly, and as anyone who’s delved into the bowls on the tables of an All Bar One will testify, stale nuts taste VILE. This is where the freezer comes in handy. Frozen nuts can be toasted straight from the freezer, but you probably won’t want to eat them untoasted once they’ve been defrosted.

And what’s my favourite nut? I really couldn’t pick. Almonds seem made for baking, whereas peanuts achieve their life’s purpose in peanut butter. A box of chocolates would be meaningless without hazelnut praline, and I can’t even imagine ice cream without pistachio. All of them work in salads, on yogurt, in muesli, and roasting a mix of them with honey, sea salt and thyme will give you one of the most moreish snacks on the planet. Just ask my father.

So my Ode to the Noble Nut is complete, and I’ll sign off by saying that if you don’t cook with them very often, this weekend please give it a go – there’s a very good chance you’ll become addicted. And since it’s Friday, and my mind is devoid of nut puns, I’m now going to invite your entries, with a mystery prize for the best one.

GO.

Butter.

The mere mention of it strikes fear into the hearts of Daily Mail readers. Never in the history of faddy eating advice has one innocent substance been so persecuted, and yet, never in the history of cookery has one substance been so vitally important. Imagine a dry, rasping slice of toast with no smear of melting gold; the springy chewiness of a plain sponge cake without a crown of sugared buttercream. Butter is the base of your sauces, the building block of bakery – it’s in every French dish you can think of. It commands respect.

Butter is made from churning cream until the fat globules separate from the buttermilk and form solid lumps. The lumps are then brought together, washed, squeezed to remove all remaining buttermilk, and shaped into pats. It’s actually incredibly easy to make your own butter – you basically just overwhip cream (and I think we can say we’ve all done that). Darina Allen did an excellent guide for the Guardian here.

A lot of snobbery persists about whether salted or unsalted butter is best – at Leiths we were told that those in the know would always choose unsalted. Well, for eating raw, I’m firmly in the salty camp…how frightfully non-u of me. I don’t think there are many tastes better than properly salted butter, particularly the stuff from Brittany that’s flecked with whole sea salt crystals. Unsalted butter is too much like raw fat for me – the salt lifts it, and enhances at the same time as curbing, its creaminess.

That said, I always have unsalted to hand for cooking – when it comes to seasoning I’m a bit of a control freak, and starting a dish using salted butter makes for an uneven flavour. Salted butter is meant to be used as the French intended it – on proper bread, and in generous amounts. Add a bunch of radishes and a crisp glass of white and we’re good to go.

Funnily enough, considering the French love affaire with butter, it was actually a Frenchman who invented the first margarine. In the 1860s Napoleon III offered a prize for the first person to invent a suitable butter substitute to feed to his troops fighting the Franco-Prussian war. The fabulously named Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès responded by blending beef fat with milk and working the texture like butter. He wasn’t terribly successful though, and sold the patent to Jurgens (now Unilever) in 1871. After French and German scientists discovered how to hydrogenate vegetable oils (altering them so they behave like butter), the product we now know and loathe was born.

Thanks to sad cases like this chap, margarine now outsells butter in America (and is pretty close here), and many people mistakenly think that the saturated fat in butter is much more dangerous to your health than the hydrogenated fat in margarine. Sham science aside, I just don’t see how anyone with common sense can think that a natural product made entirely from cream can be more harmful than a laboratory product, stuffed full of chemicals, injected with air and artificially coloured. And despite loudly declaimed marketing slogans, it only resembles butter in the way that meat substitutes resemble a dry-hung steak. Not one bit.

Just imagine this with deliciously melting hydrogenated fat...

When flicking through other people’s recipes I will automatically discard any that give you the option of using margarine instead of butter. Anybody who thinks that’s acceptable has no right calling themselves a cook, let alone telling other people how to do it. You can spot a cake made with marge a mile off – it leaves a greasy film on the inside of your mouth and has an insubstantial feel when you bite into it. Butter is the real deal – the only thing that will give you that moist, golden crumb and rounded flavour. And yes it is high in fat, but I’m not advocating you eat the whole block – or the whole cake. As with all things in life, it’s all about treating yourself. Have a scraping on your toast in the mornings, and save the heavily buttered croissants (which by the way, are almost all butter to begin with) for the weekend.

So this weekend, throw away the marge, invest in some proper Brittany butter and just go crazy. Life shouldn’t be about consistent self-denial. I mean, look at Gillian McKeith…

Christmas Dinner the Easy Way

For someone of my relatively tender years, I’ve cooked a lot of Christmas dinners. Working as a chef over a Christmas season, it was one every other day in December and when you’re cooking for up to 300 people, you have to learn some shortcuts and cheats. So my Christmas gift to you dear readers, is me sharing them here, in the hope that cooking the Christmas meal will be as enjoyable for you as it is for me. With only the very occasional swear word…. And remember, even if it all goes horribly wrong, there are very few problems that a glass of Champagne and a smile can’t solve.

By next year, I aim to be living here.

A few golden rules

• Always buy the best bird you can afford, and please try to make sure it’s free range and properly reared. Inferior, barn-reared turkeys have virtually no flavour, and because they are killed younger yield less meat, so are actually bad value for money. Our turkey for the magazine was provided by Kelly Bronze  – they hang their birds after slaughtering so they develop the most delicious gamey flavour – well worth the extra money.

• No matter how big it is, your turkey will almost never take as long as you think it will to cook. Believe me, I know! Buy a digital meat thermometer and trust it – if it reads over 72C, your turkey is cooked, so take it out of the oven.

• Remove your turkey from the fridge 2 hours before it goes in the oven to let it come back to room temperature – this helps it to cook more evenly. All the stuffing and trussing can be done in advance so all you have to do is butter it and cook it on the day. Stuff the neck and place an orange in the cavity. An empty cavity heats up like an oven, meaning that the turkey breasts are cooked from the inside and outside which will dry them out. The orange absorbs the heat and steams, to provide moisture and flavour.

• If you’re pushed for space in the oven, remember that your turkey will keep warm for 1-2 hours loosely covered with tin foil on the side, so don’t worry about putting your veg and extra stuffing in until the bird comes out. This also has the advantage of allowing you to turn the oven up to brown the spuds, without worrying about the turkey. 

• Use your microwave. Peas, greens, cabbage, bread sauce, Christmas pud can all be cooked in it to save space on the hob. If you’re blanching anything before frying it (sprouts for example) you can do that in advance, run them under cold water to cool, drain and store them in the fridge then heat them back up in the frying pan when ready.

• Don’t keep opening your oven to check everything. The rate that heat leaves an oven is astounding, and it takes a long time to come back to temperature. When you do have to go into it, be quick, and remove whatever it is that needs attention rather than adjusting it with the oven door open. The same goes for the fridge – keep it closed as much as you can and store drinks etc in buckets of ice (or outside) to stop people going in there so much. 

• Enlist some helpers to give you a hand prepping and washing up as you go. Don’t feel guilty – a glass of fizz, some Christmas music and suddenly the kitchen is the best place to be!

Don’t sweat the small stuff

• Don’t panic over gravy not thickening at the last minute. Buy or make some good fresh chicken stock and do it the night before (or even freeze it a few weeks in advance), then just add the pan juices from the turkey when you reheat it.

• Your veg (apart from the potatoes) can all be peeled and prepped the day before. Rather than soaking things in water which will make them soggy, wrap them in damp kitchen roll and leave somewhere cool overnight (a garage is ideal and will save space in the fridge.)

• Lay the table first thing in the morning (or the night before) – or better still, get someone else to do it. Child labour in this department is perfectly acceptable and they’ll thank you when they start giving dinner parties of their own. Put all glasses out of your way so that people can help themselves to drinks without getting under your feet.

My time plan – In our house we aim to sit down and eat at about 6pm. We started this tradition as we found that eating at lunch time left everyone asleep by four, and the cooks bad tempered and exhausted. This way, we have a lovely leisurely morning, get the presents done, then start cooking in the afternoon when it’s more appropriate to do  it with a glass of Prosecco in hand. Much easier for everyone and no snoring grannies.

 To serve lunch at 6pm cooking a 4kg turkey that will serve around 6-8 with leftovers (NB. although this is my time plan, it’s hardly ever stuck to as inevitably chatting, drinking and the dogs get in the way. Don’t worry about it if you run behind. Roasted veg will all hold for half an hour easily  and all steaming can be done completely last minute. Don’t panic – just enjoy yourselves.)

• 2.15pm – Heat the oven to 220C. The turkey should be stuffed, weighed and out of the fridge.
• 3.00pm – Butter and season the turkey and put it in the oven (see our turkey recipe here) Check it after 1 hour 30 minutes with a thermometer to see how it’s doing. If the thermometer says it’s done, take it out.
• 4.45pm – Par-boil the carrots and potatoes, heat the roasting fat and prep them for the oven.
• 5.00pm – Remove the turkey from the oven, place on a lipped board to catch the juices and cover loosely with foil. Put the potatoes and carrots in the oven and put the parsnips on to steam.
• 5.15pm – Put the parsnips in the oven.
• 5.30pm – Put the stuffing and chipolatas in the oven.  Warm the gravy and the bread sauce and get the sprouts ready.
• 5.40pm – Put the condiments on the table (except the gravy), ask everyone to sit down, fry off the sprouts, steam the green veg and delegate someone to carve the turkey.
• 5.50pm – Once everything is out of the oven, warm serving dishes and plates – you can use the microwave for this too. Grab three people – two to ferry dishes to the table and one to help you quickly clear up to make space in the kitchen for empty plates. Serve, sit down, and pour yourself a large glass of wine.

Merry Christmas everyone and happy cooking! And if anyone has any burning Christmas cookery queries, leave me a comment and I will help as best I can…