Lentil and parsnip salad

This salad or assemblage is a rather nice combination of flavours which put me a bit in mind of an Ottolenghi recipe (well, perhaps a simplified one). Nothing too fancy, and lots of big, hearty flavours which come together nicely under a robust dressing.

• stuff for a strong dressing: olive oil, sherry vinegar, lemon juice, a touch of raw garlic
• parsnips
• puy lentils
• chilli flakes and mint
• cherry tomatoes, other nice salad veg

First things first: chop the parsnips, dress with olive oil, dust with chilli flakes, season and roast on a medium heat for about half an hour. You want them to be very well done - the beauty of the parsnip lies in its sweetness and the sugar can not be well appreciated in an underdone root. Meantime put the lentils on and cook until al dente.

Whilst the main bits are cooking make the dressing directly in a big serving bowl. This saves on messing around with a smaller jar or other vessel. I have suggested ingredients above but anything robust is good. Steer towards a middle eastern vibe with sherry vinegar, pomegranate molasses, preserved lemons etc. rather than a French style, mustard based vinaigrette.

When the parsnips and lentils are done to your liking chuck into the bowl and finish the salad with some nice raw salad veg and herbs. I went for cherry tomatoes and mint. Also nice would be something crunchy like raw fennel, white cabbage or celery or something green and irony like blanched spinach or cavolo nero. Taste and finish off by adding salt, pepper, chilli flakes or any other dressing ingredients as you see fit.

This would be a lovely side dish to have with some grilled chicken, lamb or fish. It's pretty filling with the lentils in. At most you might need a scrap of Turkish bread - excellent with a smoky lamb kebabs and some good red wine I'd imagine. As it happened we had a vegetarian friendly version with a fried egg of top. Let me know if you try it!

Two ways with hot and nutty vegetables, Szechuan style

I'm blogging these two together as they are variations on a theme. Like the kindling noodles I cooked earlier this year, and heartily recommend, the selling point here is the combination of rich and oil nuts and/or seeds with chilli and vegetables. Sesame oil is used pretty widely in Chinese cooking for frying and flavouring and I know sesame paste is also utilized. I'm not sure exactly what that looks like but I've used tahini successfully in stir-frys and the like and it's ended up pretty well every time. All you need then is a load of vegetables and the rest of the ingredients take care of themselves - dried noodles or rice from the cupboard, sesame paste, chilli oil / dried chilli / pickled chillis, maybe a few nuts or preserved vegetables to liven things up and you're good to go. All things from the store cupboard. Crack a few eggs into the veg at the end if you're looking for more protein.

watch out for this type of pickled chilli - it's by far my favourite type so far and available in Chinatown - at about £1.50 it's worth stockpiling

pretty hedgehog patterns

• mixture of peppers OR loads of sliced up aubergines
• tahini, pickled chillies
• soy sauce, shaoxing wine
• garlic
• mix of peanuts, walnuts and sesame seeds
  

Toast your seeds and nuts lightly in a pan for a few minutes, keeping an eye on any burning.

Fry your peppers or aubergines with some veg oil. With the aubergines it's of course essential to get them really soft and silky. I did this by putting a bit of water in with them and adding a lid - this ends up half steaming and half frying them. Do what ever works for you.

When the veg has started to cook down add a couple of teaspoons of tahini, a few shakes of soy sauce and your choice of chilli heat. Taste and adjust. Chuck in some other vegetables if you fancy - shredded cabbage went very well with the peppers, giving a textural foil and preventing monotony.

When the veg seems nearly cooked add your toasted nuts and again taste and tweak the seasoning as you see fit. Serve with noodles or flat bread if feeling lazy.

To compliment the sesame paste strategically deploy some sesame oil too.

Hot-and-nutty is up there combo wise with the holy mix of Szechuan food - the hot-and-numbing mala. I'm sure there must be a proper Chinese name for it if anyone knows..? Regardless, from satay, to West African peanut soups to Chinese sesame kindling noodles it's doing it for me big time.

Pasta with roast cauliflower and pumpkin

Cheap cauliflower is a boon. It's one of those vegetables (like aubergines) that isn't often had for bargains on markets. When you see some cheap snap it up, take it home and roast it. I was prompted to roast mine by this post. I did it slightly differently, but the great thing is if you cook loads you can then have it in the fridge and ready to use in different things - a little side dish, the basis of a salad (would be great with chickpeas, turnips and preserved lemons) or, as here, with pasta.

• cauliflower
• pumpkin
• garlic, chilli flakes, cinnamon, olive oil
• pasta

Roast your cauli: in florets, with butter and salt. It will need half an hour - forty-five minutes on a medium heat.

Make the sauce: fry lots of garlic in olive oil and add the pumpkin chopped small with a little twig of cinnamon. Chuck in some chilli flakes. Put a little water in there and add a lid. Allow this all to cook down for ten or fifteen minutes, using your spoon to mash the pumpkin into a sauce. You don't need loads here - it's designed to lubricate the pasta and augment the cauliflower. If your pumpkin is anaemic and lacking taste, as mine was - from our communal garden, sprinkle a little veg stock on.

When the pumpkin is well cooked and the sauce has come together de-engage the cinnamon and discard. It has done an important job here - a slight sweetness that boosts the pumpkin and bonds with the chilli. Stir into your pasta and toss in the cauliflower. Anoint with oil or bless with parmesan as you see fit.

Yes. Sheer niceness. Where the cauliflower browns against the metal of the tray you are rewarded with a wonderful sweetness, whilst the roasting in general gives the vegetable a savour not attained through boiling or steaming. It gains an almost truffle like richness which combines with the pumpkin to make a wonderful sauce.

Chickpea and pumpkin with creamed feta

You know those brown chickpeas with their skins still on that you get in curries sometimes? Get involved. They're well nice. They need to be soaked overnight in boiling water and will then cook in about half an hour. No need to mess around with bicarb of soda or anything. Just a minute's prep the night before and then thirty minutes on the hob while you get everything else ready. I still have canned chickpeas in the cupboard for impromptu salads etc. but the texture of these dark chickpeas makes them well worth a go if you have time to plan. They seem hard and under-cooked in their jackets but when bitten into are delightfully earthy - initially resistant but ultimately giving.

This is one of those simple assemblages that makes a lot of sense on an inclement mid-week evening.

• lots of chick peas
• a third - a half that amount in pumpkin/squash
• a third that amount of onions
• a few nice ripe tomatoes
• a block of feta
• preserved lemons
• olive oil, cumin, chilli flakes, garlic

Soak your chickpeas over night. Put them on to boil on a moderate heat. After twenty minutes check their progress and add chunks of pumpkin/squash.

Chop lots of garlic and fry in plenty of olive oil with cumin and chilli. This is my Turkish holy trinity of flavours which you can use all over the shop to flavour soups, salads and stews. Add the onions in slices and cook these down on a medium heat. They are a key ingredient here, not just background mulch, so make sure they are good and soft.

Meantime mash and thin the feta with a little olive oil and a drop of cream (or water if you have none to hand) in a bowl. Add plenty of black pepper and some rinsed preserved lemon sliced thinly. Mash until you have a thick paste - this is the taste bomb necessary to perk the mash beneath it - salt, sheep, adult/child lemon sherbet. Herbs such as thyme and rosemary would also work well.

When the chickpeas are done put them in with the onions and a a few ripe chopped tomatoes. Cook this all for five minutes to relax it and so the tomatoes break down to make a sauce. No need for salt as the feta will supply this. Serve with a dollop of creamed feta on top and some red wine or Turkish beer.

Spicy green tomato chutney

As well as cucumbers my communal garden has lots of tomatoes. Unfortunately they too have been a bit neglected and I fear that it's a bit late in the year for them to ripen. So I picked a load of them and made a spiced green tomato chutney. I like Nigel Slater's suggestion of putting a few ripe tomatoes in the mix as well, so I chucked in a few shop bought ones.

In the spirit of educating myself about chutney-making I did everything by eye.

• the amount of tomatoes above (two kg?)
• 400g sugar
• 350 ml vinegar (try malt/white wine mix)
• chopped fresh chillies to taste
• two onions chopped small
• a handful of raisins
• a few cloves, peppercorns, star anise, cumin, coriander seed - take your pick
  
  

Fry your onion in oil for five minutes then add everything else (easy huh?). Cook on a low heat for fifty - sixty minutes.

After finding the plum chutney (which I recently broke out - very nice. It had softened and rounded over time.) I made a while ago a little bit liquid I was careful to leave this one for an extra twenty minutes or so. It probably had about an hour in total. The tomatoes break down very thoroughly and make a wonderfully jammy matrix for the other bits.

Push a bit to one side and if it doesn't rush back immediately it's nearly ready.
 

Have your empty jam jars immersed in another pot with boiling water and decant your hot chutney into them.

My chutney draw is getting pretty healthily populated!

Dal 5 - corn and dal soup

There is an interesting looking recipe in Madhur Jaffrey's Easy Curry for a fairly thin dal with slices of intact corn cob. You cook the corn in-the-piece with the husk presumably enriching the dal itself and the corn a plump treat needing a quick finger grapple or fork stab.

I used yellow lentils for this. It's all very simple and fairly familiar probably.

• corn
• lentils
• onion
• nice ripe tomato or other veg
• mustard seed, asfoetida, cumin (use these three in ratio 3:3:1), turmeric
• dried red chilli and/or fresh chilli to your liking

Boil your lentils in water with turmeric. Skim off the scum that comes out of them (why do nice wholesome lentils yield scum, I thought this was mainly grotty lamb neck and other tendon, bone and cartilage heavy meat products?). This is well worth doing by the way - my eyes often glaze over when reading recipe steps like this which seem vaguely optional, but they really do give up a strange and not very enticing scum that's better out the pot.

When the lentils are partly cooked add the slices of corn and top up with water to a soup consistency. After five minutes add a few roughly chopped tomato.

Meantime fry your onion in ghee for ten minutes. Then add all the spices and the chilli and fry until the mustard seeds start to pop. This will be around a minute with the onion sharing the heat - a matter a seconds in a naked pan. When the corn is nearly done put in the onion mixture - the onions should be really soft.

Cook for another five minutes and then adjust seasoning/flavours if needed with a little salt, pepper or ghee. Sprinkle on some veg stock if the flavour is thin.

And there you have it. I like doing this type of soups if people come over - it's all in one pot and with some Indian bread and some pickles it's a whole easy meal. If you fancy the proper dal version just use less water - it's equally tasty.

Congee Mk 4 - spiced pumpkin

Funny how sometimes you can throw together a few things in a saucepan whilst pottering around doing a bit of pollyfiller-ing and cleaning and suddenly there's sublime dinner waiting for you, silky and steaming on the kitchen table. After the mega faff of the partridge congee which wasn’t that great this version took about ten minutes of prep and maybe an hour and a quarter of quiet puttering on the hob. It’s the simplest congee I’ve made so far, and definitely the nicest.

The basic idea is to flavour the rice with sweet pumpkin or squash and then judiciously add minimal additions to bring it to its peak.

• three small handfuls long grain rice
• a butternut squash or equivalent slab of pumpkin
• preserved vegetables
• chilli oil, soy sauce, white pepper, cinnamon or cassia
• a little bit of something green
  
  

Put your rice in a pot and add water. I think you need about five times as much as you would normally use to cook rice. Add a piece of cinnamon (which compliments the sweetness of the pumpkin incredibly). Simmer for forty minutes until the rice starts to break down.

Add the pumpkin or squash in cubes and continue cooking. Monitor water levels. After twenty minutes help mash down the pumpkin - the texture of the mixture should be silky and the grains of rice almost invisible as individual entities.

Add the preserved vegetables - I went for black fungus above and some Tianjin ones shown up top. Preserved vegetables are a god-send for Chinese food and you should keep some in the cupboard at all times.

Season with soy sauce for salt, then sesame oil, then lavishly dose with your favourite chilli oil.

deep, brindled gold flecked with red

It probably needs something green at this point to make it a bit more balanced so I added some peas to this after the picture was taken.

Cabbage, pasta, parmesan and chickpea soup

Like parsimonious Italian grannies, in my flat we've been saving the rinds of spent blocks of partisan for a moment such as this. Now they come to the fore and truly become themselves. Soup. To be specific, a kind of minestrone x pasta e fagioli bastard, miscegenation born of necessity. The cabbage, pasta, parmesan and chickpeas are the backbone of this dish - feel free to experiment with the other ingredients but I think these four should remain as the central pillars around which the flavour is woven. If you have some white wine to hand why not add a small glass to the pot?

• an onions and some garlic
• one cabbage
• one tin chickpeas (or other beans)
• parmesan
• vegetable stock
• pasta
• olive oil
• dried chilli
• fresh basil (not crucial)

Chop your onions and garlic and cook in olive oil. Give them ten minutes or so to get properly translucent and nice. Add the parmesan rinds and some dried chilli.

Introduce stock, a shredded cabbage and a tin of chickpeas. A couple of minutes later put in some pasta (don't go mad with the amounts - it should compliment and not dominate the rest of the ingredients). Cook for ten to fifteen minutes and make sure everything is cooked. Now is not an al dente time. Season, add more olive oil if needed and stir in some grated parmesan. Add some basil at the end if you have some, it's not a big deal if you don't

This soup is a great example of a combination which exalts its humble components beyond the store-cupboard. The chickpeas and pasta give it main-meal heft, the cabbage gives you vegetable goodness and the parmesan, chilli and garlic keep things interesting. You could posh it up a bit bit that qualifies as gilding the lilly in my book.

Potato and stilton frittata

As we have seen frittatas are the ultimate fridge-clearers and most forgiving of evening meals. Fry pretty much anything in the fridge, pour over some whisked eggs and cook on the hob. Finish with a few minute's flash under the grill to brown things.

• eggs
• stilton or other blue cheese
• carrots and potatoes

Add the stilton right at the end - if you add it too early it will all melt away and you will lost the mini molten-cheese pocket effect.

Ice-cream with sauce of maple syrup and Stoli in 2:1 ratio for pudding. This combination is sublime and I suggest you try it.

Dal 4 - mixed pulses in a soup

Dal quest continues. Coincidentally The Grauniad ran a similarly themed article - How to cook perfect dal.

This attempt had mixed pulses - green lentils, green split peas, orange lentils and black-eyed beans. They all went in to boil at the same time in plenty of water bar the orange lentils which take less time to cook and consequently went in later. I also added a knob of tamarind to give some sour-sweet background.

Instead of the obligatory onions in this I used spring-onions as they were lying around. They are very cheap on Ridley Road at the minutes - four big bunches for a pound.

• mix of dried lentils, beans and peas (whatever you have in your cupboard)
• onions or spring onions
• cumin, coriander seed, mustard seed, curry leaves, tamarind, garlic, green chillies
• creamed coconut
  

Set the pulses to boil, taking into account how long each one will take and adding accordingly. Chuck in a know of tamarind and some turmeric and salt.

Make the spicy onion mix. Fry the onions in a generous amount of ghee and after ten minutes add chopped garlic and lots of green chillies. Keep them at a temperature high enough to almost burn the onion, which should give it a desirably rough and smoky tinge. Add the dried spices and fry for another ten minutes.

When the pulses are cooked combine with the spices and onion. Stir and cook for another five minutes. Add some water if needed to make a soupy mixture and shave in some creamed coconut at the end: enough to hint at but not fully deliver richness.

This one has a nice mix of flavour and made a good tea with some pitta and some pickles. Nothing too exotic.