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!

Xmas 2011

Apologies for the slackness, I was very busy doing nothing for quite a few days. Other days were spent touring around the country to Norfolk and Glastonbury, eating fish, spotting seals, watching Spiral, reading and drinking gin and ale. Now it's 2012, it's January, it's windy and it's back to work. So it goes. I'm ready to approach cooking and the blog once again with a manner befitting a new year and new resolutions.

Here are some snaps of xmas dinner.

 topside of beef

pigs in blankets

spuds being prepped

nut-roast

• brown bread crumbs
• mixed nuts
• carrots, peas, onions
• veg stock/marmite

Fry a couple of onions chopped with garlic in oil. After a while add the carrots chopped small and the peas. Add seasoned brown breadcrumbs and smashed up nuts. Top up with some veg stock and top with nuts toasted with sage. Bake. Delicious.

 carrot and swede purée

This is the bomb! Take an equal amount of carrot and swede and boil until very tender. Blitz in a magimix, add a knob of butter, a couple of spoons of creme fraiche and a seasoning of cumin and black pepper. Don't be tempted to mash by hand - it's just not the same. The cumin and the pepper bounce of the sweetness of the vegetables wonderfully, and the dairy stuff rounds it all out. Very nice.

The whole hog with sprouts, potatoes, yorkshire puddings and roast parsnips. I think having something mashed is great as otherwise everything is roast and crispy. Soft and giving mash compliments the crunch and heft of the other elements.

Happy new year.

Spaghetti with cherry tomatoes, creme fraiche and bottarga

Bottarga's a bit of a funny one. Incredibly expensive (an entire dried roe in a Bologna Deli whose price I enquired was valued at over forty euroes), and strongly redolent of fish food in its little jar, it sits in the cupboard waiting for moments such as this. It's a luxury item like truffle oil that's best saved for an occasional treat. Used judiciously and simply (like truffle oil) it gives an extra kick to standard dishes. For this combination try and get hold of very sweet cherry tomatoes and cook them slowly to give a wonderful flavoursome sauce.

• cherry tomatoes
• olive oil
• a few cloves of garlic, chilli flakes
• bottarga
• creme fraiche

The key here is to give the tomatoes plenty of time - be generous with the olive oil and garlic and patient with the cooking time. They will break down and form a wonderful sauce. Add chilli flakes to taste.

Serve with a dab of creme fraiche and a sprinkle of bottarga. These can then be mixed on the plate to make a beautifully rich but simple sauce.

Some fine parmesan may or may not be gilding the lilly. You decide.

SD, ON's chilli con carne

Beautiful huh?  The dark orange of those little chillies in the middle is just amazing. After a bit of a scatter-gun approach to chilli inclusion in the pork stew I made a few months ago I would like to ID these ones. The top chilli is ancho (massive, mild, rich, sweet/smoky). If you know what the others are can you please let me know.

Having nabbed an enormous bit of beef in the supermarket (a silverside roast on one of those half price deals) I wanted to make some sort of spiced beef stew. Now the obvious cultural touchstone is the oft used and abused chilli con carne. There are purists and pragmatists - there are dilettantes and devotees. I've enjoyed all sorts and do not take a hard-line on these matters. (Why is it always made with mince thought?)

So I made up the recipe with some background reading informed by hollow legs and the Guardian. I did not include beans (though there were some on the side, refried style) but did include some tomatoes (not too many though).

• cheap cut of beef, roughly cubed
• lots of carrots (1/3 the amount of beef)
• lots of onions (1/2 the amount of beef)
• spices: cinnamon stick, five cloves, a big-ish spoon of cumin
• a sprinkle of oregano
• one head of garlic
• one big handful of sweet cherry tomatoes
• a selection of dried Mexican chillies
• two limes
  

Toast the chillies and then soak them in boiling water for half an hour.

Brown the beef in batches.

Fry the onions roughly chopped in vegetable oil for ten minutes. Add the spices and fry for a couple of minutes. Add the whole head of garlic - cloves peeled but un-chopped (they will disintegrate). Add the chopped carrot and tomatoes. Add the beef. Add the oregano.

Blitz the chillies to a paste in the magimix. Add this to the mix.

Cook for two and half - three and a half hours. Mash down any big bits of beef and the garlic cloves. Squeeze two limes in.

Serve with delicious thinly sliced red onions softened in lime juice, refried beans, salad and sour cream.

messy

Messy and vary tasty. This preparation certainly had the heat that the pork lacked but it was a slow and rich heat the lazily penetrated the mouth, pleasurably tempered by the vegetable content. Very pleasing and very easy to prepare. This is a rough and ready dish which doesn't suite fussiness so will be easy to adapt.

Chickpeas with saltfish, tomatoes, garlic and kale

Assemblages. They are the business. Not quite salads, stews or anything else, assemblages are the pragmatists' favourite - a type of mixed dish which can take everything from fridge skulking vegetables to the finest of treat produce. With something filling and carbohydrate based in the mix they constitute an entire, discrete meal. Beautiful.

This cracking dish is from a small River Cafe fish book and centres around three central earthy ingredients: saltfish, chickpeas and kale.

• saltfish
• chickpeas
• kale
• tomatoes
• garlic, dried chilli, olive oil

The night before you cook put the chickpeas in a bowl of boiling water. They are so central to this dish that it's worth the bother of soaking your own. When the cooking has started in earnest put the chickpeas on to boil - they'll need about forty minutes. Put your saltfish through three boils of cold water and see how salty it is. It may need one more.

Chop loads of garlic and and slowly cook in plenty of olive oil with a handful of sweet cherry tomatoes. After ten minutes add the chilli to taste. When the saltfish is satisfactorily de-desalinated push the tomatoes to one side of the pan and briefly fry the fish in the flavoured oil. Meantime, cook your kale down in some water until tender; ready your chickpeas. Combine everything in something big and add a splash of sherry vinegar and another of olive oil. I also chucked in some nice, sharp rocket. Lashings of pepper also advisable.

A wonderful mix. In turn resistant and giving - taste sweet and salt, iron and pepper. One might easily make it vegetarian compatible by using some nice grilled halloumi instead of the fish. On a similar tip the St John cookbook has an assemblage of tomatoes, boiled potatoes, roast garlic, roast tomatoes, saltfish, chopped boiled egg and parsley which is also amazing and probably next on my list as I bought three packs of saltfish for a fiver.

enjoy

Aubergine and bread salad +

This was one of those spur of the moments meal. I'd been down to Ridley Road and picked up a bag of baby aubergines for £1. (Yes: one pound for about fifteen or so hand length aubergines). Also four packets of beautiful baby plum tomatoes for a pound and a load of dirt cheap fennel. Crazy.

So I got back and pottered about with the back of my brain wondering what to cook for lunch: Szechuan aubergines, curry, some sort of soup... How about just sticking the aubergines and tomatoes on to roast and then chucking together a salad? Ok, let's give it a go.

• baby aubergine
• cherry tomatoes
• fennel or some other raw veg
• flatbread
• feta or salad cheese
• yoghurt, garlic, pomegranite molasses, lemon juice, olive oil and sherry vinegar

 Roast the aubergines and tomatos with olive oil for thirty minutes or so

Meantime: chop the fennel or other raw salad veg. I advise going for something with a little crunch here to contrast with the soft and silken vegetables. Roughly chop or mash your cheese (I used a cheap, mild Turkish salad cheese which was 1/4 the price of feta).

When the veg is half done in the oven put in your flat-bread (I used wholemeal pittas to nice effect). The aim is crisp them up and put them in the salad fattoush style. When they are getting semi-crisp take them out and chop roughly. Add to the veg and cheese. Dress with a bit of olive oil and stir. The bread will start to absorb the essence of the vegetables, especially via the liquid insides of the tomatoes.

Mix the yoghurt dressing - 80% yoghurt, 7% water, 7% olive oil, 4% pomegranate molasses and 2% sherry vinegar. Add one clove of garlic chopped very fine and some salt and coarse black pepper.

Layer up the salad base with the bread, put on top the roast veg and then dress liberally.

some preserved lemons would also work here with the cheese and bread

Very nice, though I say so myself, and substantial enough for a complete lunch. The roast vegetables are still warm, rich and comforting, the fennel faintly regal and stand-offish, the bread the doughty workhorse of the piece. A nice balance.

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.