Pizza dough

Pizza dough is one of those things that always cause me to get out dozens of recipe books, and, even then, I'm not satisfied. Last night, I made the best pizza dough ever, so I need to write it down. It came from the green River Cafe book, and, as so often with the River Cafe recipes, it didn't work as instructed, but, luckily, I was able to rescue it. This is a more sophisticated recipe than most, and has a little rye flour in it, to give it an edge.

Step 1: Mix four teaspoons of dried yeast (the sort that comes in a tin, not an instant sachet) with 125ml warm water (as a rough guide, two thirds from the cold tap, one third from the kettle, don't obsess). When the yeast has dissolved, add 150g rye flour. The instructions say to leave this for half an hour to form a sponge, but there's no chance of that with so little water, all you'll get is a hard ball. So I added more water, probably about the same amount again. Basically, you want the mixture to be loose. It will grow, so make sure you're doing this in a big bowl or mixing jug.

Step 2: When the mixture has frothed, which will take at least half an hour, and maybe more if there's a draft, or it's not very warm, you make the dough. In your mixer bowl, measure 500g plain flour (I used soft pasta flour for this, you really don't have to use hard bread flour), one tablespoon of salt (I use Maldon salt for everything), four tablespoons of olive oil, two tablespoons of milk, and 250g warm water (same rough guide as in step one). Then add your sponge, and mix with a dough hook. When it's kneaded, remove the hook and leave in a warm place to rise. It will need at least two hours. We went to the cinema at this point (Music and Lyrics, very funny), and came back three hours later.

Step 3: Knock back the dough, and leave to rise for another 40 minutes. (We did not do this, because we were hungry. The dough was good, two rises is counsel of perfection, and not always possible; bread dough is very accommodating).

Step 4: Divide the dough into four, roll into balls (flour the worktops an your hands), they will be about the size of cricket balls. Then roll these out using a rolling pin (although, actually, the pizza chef at Pizzeria Mama Mia in South Parade, Oxford, spins them on his fingers, then pinches out little bits to fill in any holes - fascinating watching him, if you sit at the small table by the kitchen window, Alfred, then aged about eight, and I were mesmerised).

Add your toppings, then put in a hot oven.

Lucius, Lettice and Alfred all swirled theirs with tomato sauce, then added a variety of delicacies - Parma ham, mushrooms, cheeses, etc. I had pizza bianca, with a scraping of onion which had been slowly stewed in olive oil, topped with a few pine nuts, some capers, and sultanas soaked in hot saffron water. Then I topped the lot with a pile of peppery winter salad leaves from the greenhouse (lots of rocket, a little mizuna, that sort of thing). Fantastic. And it was good fun, too.

Red cabbage

Red cabbage seems to be one of those things you either love or hate. My father always has to go out of the house if it's cooking, because he says he can't bear the smell of vinegar (although he likes pickled onions, salt and vinegar crisps - it's funny how particular and precise our palates are). Lucius says it's wasted on him, which is as close as he gets to saying yuck (kind man). Lettice and I both love it. But I often find that I don't get it quite right, particularly if I just do it from memory. This recipe, from Mary Berry's Aga cookbook, is the best, and I thought I would note it down as the cabbage cooks. I always do lots, because it freezes well, and is good when there's a crowd.

Shred one medium red cabbage. Peel, core and chop 6 or 7 eating apples. Put them into a big pan with six tablespoons of water, 40g sugar, and some salt. Stir. Bring to the boil (a matter of seconds), cover, and put in the bottom oven for one hour (ie cook very slowly, on a low flame). When it's cooked, add six tablespoons of vinegar (red wine vinegar is what I usually use), one tablespoon of redcurrant jelly, and a slug of olive oil (MB uses 50g of butter, but I don't, for obvious reasons).

You can eat this straight away, but I find it has a better flavour if you make it ahead and reheat it - I do this slowly in the bottom oven for half an hour or so, but you can do it over a low flame, in which case it needs to be stirred every so often. If you are going to freeze it, then make sure it's completely unfrozen before starting to reheat, otherwise it goes all mushy, and then it's not very good to eat.

Anchovy dressing for broccoli

Last week the recipe that came with my veg box was for a broccoli salad dressed in anchovy sauce. I liked the idea of it, but never got round to making it. In fact, I never actually read the instructions, just thought that an anchovy sauce would be good with broccoli. So last night, when I was cooking this week's veg box broccoli, I dug out the recipe. I don't know about you, but I don't like cold broccoli. So that was the end of that.

Instead, I dressed the hot broccoli in a sauce I whizzed up from six anchovies (I keep a jar of them in the fridge), one tablespoon of red wine vinegar, and two tablespoons of 0% fat fromage frais. Good strong flavour. One to remember. And a definite improvement on cold broccoli salad.

It also happened that we finished up some carrots from the weekend, sliced and cooked in freshly squeezed orange juice. On Sunday, I didn't reduce the juice, and they were okay. Last night I reduced the juice down to a sticky nothing, and they were fabulous. Also unexpectedly good beside the broccoli.

Dhal for lunch

Stefan the plumber who is here re-doing our bathrooms remarked last week that dhal was the best meal ever. So when I picked up the Waitrose freebie magazine Seasons and there was a recipe for spiced dhal, I decided to make some for my lunch. I didn't quite follow the recipe, and this is what I did:

Peel and chop one onion, sweat in some oil. Add a little curry powder, stir for a moment or two, then add a tin of tomatoes. When it's bubbling, add 120g red lentils and a canful of water. Bring back to the boil, then simmer for about 20 minutes until the lentils are tender.

I ate this with beautiful golden and scented saffron rice, which I cooked with a little of the onion and some pine nuts. (One cupful of rice, added to some chopped sweated onion and pine nuts, stirred about for a few moments, then cooked with the lid on tight in two cupsful of water until it's all gone and the rice is fluffy; then put aside to steam for a couple of minutes, or until everything else is ready. You add the saffron to a little hot water taken from one of the cups, soak it for a while before pouring it all into the pan.)

Quick, cheap, healthy heart food - Stefan was right!

Lentil salad with home-made cheese

At last, I've managed to take some photographs whilst preparing lunch! Johanna the passionate cook once took me to task (in a friendly way) for the lack of photos on my blog, and I've felt vaguely guilty about this ever since, even though my blog has always been mostly about helping me to remember what I've been cooking, and making it easy for friends to access specific recipes of things they've eaten here and liked.

I love lentils, all pulses really, but no-one else in the family shares this passion, so I have to choose lentil recipes with great care. Pulses are, of course, a particularly healthy heart food, the fibre helping to reduce cholesterol levels (that sounds SO like new age mumbo jumbo that I'm almost embarrassed to have written it - at the very least, the more beans you eat, the less room there is for meat, with its attendant dollops of saturated fat).

Lucius always looks vaguely disappointed whenever pulses are on the menu: not this time, though. And I know that cheese-making sounds like a time-consuming activity, but it's not, it's just one of those recipes you have to start early so that they can get on and do their thing all by themselves. This was a couple of minute's fiddling just after breakfast. Cooking the lentils was the most time-consuming (a minute or two for prep, then keeping an eye on them for the 20 minutes they took to cook). Out to the greenhouse for some salad leaves, and then a quick assembly job just before we ate. The result was lemon-scented salty lentils dressed in olive oil, their sharp savoury flavour set off by the soft sweetness of the barely-set curd cheese. One to make again and again.

First, the cheese. Put one litre of milk in a stainless steel saucepan and heat to blood temperature. In other words, put your finger in - if it feels hot, it's higher than blood temperature, if it feels cold, it's lower. The exact temperature is not critical, but it is important not to let it boil. Take it off the heat and put in two teaspoons of rennet. You may think rennet is impossible find, but it's not - I bought it (99p for a bottle which will last ages) in a medium-sized Waitrose, on the baking section. Leave this for fifteen minutes, at which point you will have what my grandmother called junket (and which we ate loads of during my childhood, those unimaginable days before yoghurt came in highly flavoured little pots). This is what Little Miss Muffet was eating - curds and whey.
To make the cheese, you need to drain off all the whey. You are supposed to do this by putting the curds into a muslin square which you then hang up. I had started before I realised there was no muslin in the house, and I didn't think a tea towel would do the trick. So I put some of the curds into my four little coeur a la creme pots, which have drain holes in the bottom, and the rest into a conical sieve. Drip drip drip until lunchtime. I'm afraid I let the whey go down the drain - the very particular flavour of Parma ham results from the pigs being fed on the whey made by makers of Parmesan cheese. But we don't have any pigs, and I didn't think the cats would like whey as much as the whole milk they normally drink.

Next, the lentils. 100g of Puy lentils will be enough for four people as a starter or side dish. Cook them in plenty of water with a sliced onion and some bay leaves. They'll be soft but not mushy within 20 minutes. Drain them, discard the bay, and dress them while they are still warm. I used the zest and juice of a lemon, lots of olive oil, with a little Maldon salt. When they were cool, I added half a tin of chopped anchovy fillets.

The rest was just an assembly job, using the strong flavours of the oriental mix salad leaves that are now growing strongly in the (unheated) greenhouse. It's a pity I didn't sow them in October rather than November, and then we would have had salad leaves all through the dark days of December and January.

My friend Susan, a very good cook, arrived for lunch towards the end of this process, and remarked that "real cooking" was in progress. True, but the sort that requires you to be a tiny bit organised (ie have decided what's for lunch three hours beforehand), rather than energetic. We ate it with home-made slow white bread, another recipe where time does all the work for you. Susan thought the blog should be decorated with me posing, chef-like, in front of my artfully arranged food. She took a couple of shots, but I'm not posting them because - as always - I look attrocious, laughing in one, talking in the other.

Here's a great idea ...

I've been thinking ... this sounds great .... it's Gennaro Contaldo's Italian porchetta - 5kg of belly pork should be enough to feed everyone at dinner, and you make your main preparations well ahead, give it a quick blast on the highest setting, then cook it slowly with fennel for hours and hours. I vaguely remember Jamie Oliver doing something like this in his Italy series, so I'll have to look that up. Or I could make it ahead - double quantities - and serve it cold for lunch, with herby boiled potatoes and one of Skye's beautiful salads. I think I feel a decision coming on, but I'll have to consult the butcher first ...


PS there's nothing new in the blogosphere ... I've just - belatedly - been doing an internet search for porchetta (somehow, for me, it feels more natural to go to the recipe books first, but I think I may be going to get out of this 20th century habit fairly soon!) .. and found this wonderful post, covering both Contaldo and Oliver. Thanks, Keiko!

Birthday planning - and an orange cake

Here, never mind Valentine's Day, we are planning for Lucius's 60th birthday, which falls on February 15th. Thank heavens he wasn't born a few hours earlier, or he would have been called Valentine, so his mother used to tell me. So this year's not the year for little heart-shaped amuse bouches, or relentlessly pink puddings (not that I've ever gone in for that sort of cooking, in truth).

On the great day itself, I am organising a magical mystery tour (he wanted it to start at 2pm, after he'd had a meeting, but I told him to rearrange it - it's not every day you have your sixtieth birthday during half term, so that the children can join in too). Then on Saturday 17th, some of his closest friends are coming to dinner - we'll be 10 or 12 round the table. The following day, his family are coming for lunch, and then we'll be 35-40, everyone helping themselves. That's a lot of cooking in a short space of time (& I forgot to mention breakfast on Sunday morning for the friends staying the night), so it has to be carefully planned.

Careful planning means, of course, getting out the recipe books. You can't really follow a recipe for a large party, because, in general, they are for 4-6 people, and not conducive to multiplication. So when there's a crowd, it's easy to get stuck in the cold-ham-baked-potatoes-and-a-salad rut (or in summer cold salmon, boiled potatoes and a salad - you get the idea). On the other hand, it's got to be easy enough to serve without fuss, and so that I am at the party, rather than stuck in kitchen maid mode: red-faced, cross, & missing all the fun.

So, for inspiration, I've been reading Skye Gyngell's lovely book A Year in my Kitchen, as well as Diva Cooking by Victoria Blashford-Snell and Jennifer Joyce. And then, to keep my feet firmly on the ground, Cook Now, Eat Later by Mary Berry, whose work is a little like Delia's. Nigel Slater's no good for this sort of thing, because he only ever seems to cook for two or three, and for him a crowd is six, whereas, with four children, that's my starting point; Nigella doesn't like crowds, either, although I think that's because all her crowd-pleasing recipes seem to involve so much last-minute work.

Here, we want special, celebratory food. I've got plenty of time to prepare ahead, and don't want too much last-minute fuss to spoil the party for me. I also don't want to veer too far from our usual path of avoiding saturated fat, eating plenty of seasonal fruit and veg. However, it is a party, a special party, and rules are made to be broken. And there's another thing: potatoes are Lucius's favourite food, in fact, he doesn't really consider it a meal unless there are hot potatoes.

At the moment, I'm thinking Skye's cauliflower and Gorgonzola soup with pickled pear relish - the relish can be made several days in advance, and will probably be all the better for it; the soup can be made a day or two ahead, and will be easy to reheat and serve. Also, I'm still getting terrific pears and cauliflowers in my veg box. A little cheese in the soup will be a real treat for us. This agra dolce combination, so typical of Skye's food, will be wonderful with home-made white bread, the NY Times recipe that so many bloggers have just discovered.

Skye also has lots of tempting salads, particularly one made with sprouting broccoli, radicchio and frisee dressed with chilli and garlic oil. That sounds as if it would be good with lamb, but I haven't yet decided - I need to talk to the butcher.

Pudding - Skye has a lovely blood orange jelly, which I thought I'd make for dinner, and serve with sliced blood oranges. I love them, always have, that little bit of Sicilian sunshine which brightens up the dark months of northern Europe. There are plenty of them in the market at the moment, although I have noticed that Waitrose has started to call them blush oranges. What's wrong with traditional names, particularly when they are more descriptive than the new, mealy-mouthed marketing department's apology for a name?

So dinner's getting sorted - I just have to decide on a main course, and something to hand round with drinks.

Buffet lunch - the only thing I have so far decided is that for pudding we'll have meringues and some sort of fruit compote, together with an orange cake, the lovely Claudia Roden cake from her Book of Jewish Food, which is one of my all-time favourite winter puddings. It looks like the summer sun, vibrant with colour, it tastes of the southern Mediterranean - sweet with almonds, bitter with orange. It is a recipe redolent with history, a Sephardic recipe which has been made for centuries to celebrate the winter months. Our chickens have come into full lay, so it's a useful way to use their eggs to good effect - cakes are definitely better made with the best eggs, and our Buff Orpington chickens scratch around the garden most days, finding whatever they like to eat (and last weekend that was the young shoots of the kale I've been anticipating for the kitchen!).

So ... lots more decisions, any suggestions welcomed.

Claudia Roden's orange cake

2 oranges
6 eggs
250g sugar
2 tbsp orange blossom water
1 tsp baking powder
250g ground almonds

Boil the oranges in water until they are soft. This will take about an hour, perhaps a little more. Carefully drain them in a colander, and, when they are cool, split them open with your hands and take out the pips. Put them into the Magimix with all the other ingredients, and whizz until everything is smooth (the oranges will disintegrate in moments, which makes me think you could probably mix this by hand without any real difficulty, although I have never tried this).

It would be better if you beat the eggs and sugar together first, but I never do. It would be better if you ground your own lightly toasted almonds, but I seldom do. It does not much matter if you leave out the orange blossom water, which I sometimes do. Last time I made it I forgot to put in the baking powder, and the result was a little less light than usual, but it did not spoil the cake. This is a very forgiving recipe (and you can make it with any sort of orange citrus - clementines are good).

Pour into a 26cm tin which you have greased (I always use olive oil for this). CR says you should dust it with flour or Matzo meal; I never have, because I use a clip tin with a removable base. Bake for one hour at 190C, and leave to cool in the tin before turning out.

Three root mash, for Lettice

On Saturday, we went temporarily mad, and drove for a couple of hours to watch Alfred play hockey in Cheltenham. Lettice was very keen to see him play, and this was the only opportunity she would have this term. So off we went, leaving the house straight after a late breakfast (kippers, great start to the weekend). On the way, we stopped at the Kilkenny Inn*, which is just outside Cheltenham, where we had a good, home-cooked lunch (soup for Lucius, steak sandwich for Lettice, chicken Caesar for me) whilst reading the papers.

Lettice found a recipe for three root mash. "Let's have that for lunch tomorrow." "Well, we're having mashed potato tonight." "Please, please, PLEASE." And so we did. With game stew, made with a mix of venison, pheasant and partridge bought from my wonderful butcher Gabriel Machin* in Henley.

We didn't read the recipe properly, I don't even know which paper it was in. We just made it up as we went along: I peeled and chunked equal quantities of carrot and parsnip, then boiled them until they were tender. Meanwhile, I peeled some potatoes, roughly the same amount as the combined carrot and parsnip. These I cooked separately. When I drained the carrot and parsnip, I kept the cooking water. Then I blitzed them in the Magimix, adding a little cooking water. Meanwhile, I drained and mashed the potatoes, again using some of the saved cooked water to loosen the mixture(I didn't keep the potato water because it's so starchy). And then I combined them. The result was a beautiful orangey-mash, sweet to taste, and particularly good with the venison.

We also ate a cauliflower gratin (steamed cauli, bathed in a bechamel made with olive oil and skimmed milk), and topped with rosemary citrus salt (I thought I'd posted this before, but I haven't, so the "recipe" follows), braised leeks (chopped into rings, and gently stewed in olive oil), and red cabbage from the night before.

The rosemary citrus salt is one of a number of useful things to keep in the fridge and use where you might once have used cheese. It takes moments to prepare, and keeps forever in a little plastic box in the fridge. Put 100g Maldon sea crystals in a mortar, add the finely grated zest of a lemon and an orange (at this time of year a Seville orange might by extra tang-y), and the chopped leaves of a couple of twigs of rosemary. Bash it all up until you get a sticky mess, then spread it out thinly onto a baking tray. It needs to dry out before you can store it, so I put it on top of my Aga for a few hours, but anywhere warm and dry would do. It goes on lots of things, to make them a little more exciting - fish, lamb, gratins - and makes a change from anchovy breadcrumbs, another stalwart of this kitchen.


*Neither of these excellent establishments has a website, although they both appear in various listing sites

PS Alfred won't thank me for telling you, but his team lost

Retro fish mousse

There's something rather 70s about using gelatine, and it's probably 30 years since I last did. This was a way to use up the end of the Christmas smoked salmon, although I think it would work with any kind of fish, fresh or smoked. (Actually, I don't yet know if it's "worked" because I haven't turned out the mould, but it looks and tastes good.) We've got some neighbours coming for supper in the kitchen tomorrow, and this seemed an elegant but not over-the-top way to begin.

Blitz 700g smoked salmon trimmings with a 500g tub of 0% fromage frais, and the juice & finely grated rind of a lemon. Meanwhile, soak in water two small sheets of gelatine (I used Costa fine leaf, bought in Waitrose), and heat 250ml fish stock. Take the stock off the heat, squeeze the gelatine and drop it into the stock. Stir to dissolve, then leave to cool. When it's cold but not set, mix it into the fish. This is enough for about eight people, so I put some into four little ramekins, the rest into a terrine mould lined with cling film. I'll freeze this and use it next week when we've got a few more people coming round.

I bought the fish stock, even though I normally try not to use industrially processed food. It was Waitrose Cooks' Ingredients, the sort that comes in a plastic bag. I read the ingredients list carefully, and decided to buy it because it had no salt, and contained only things that I use in my kitchen - white fish, lobster, langoustine, carrot, onion, white wine, tomato puree, celery, lemon juice, tarragon, bay leaf, white pepper. It doesn't say how much water there is - my guess is lots, because you would have been hard pressed to taste many if any of those flavours. Next time I'm at the fishmonger, I think I'll get some trimmings and make my own, so that I can freeze it in very small amounts.

Beetroot salad

We've been eating seasonally for over a year now - easy in the summer, but it needs careful thought at this time of year. As we've got better at it, we've added more rules: positively no vegetables with jet lag, preferably raised in the UK, although trucked in from Spain at a pinch. We're not sure what to think about British veg raised under heated glass (this week's lettuce, after weeks without), or frozen veg (all that electricity), or cans, or commercially bottled produce. We're not yet ready to say that everything should be raised in the garden, but I am certainly planning a more elaborate veg patch this year. I am already more concerned with late summer and autumn plantings than spring sowings, because if you get the early sowings wrong, there's plenty of choice in the market. If you plant late in the autumn, then the winter salads aren't growing well enough to sustain the kitchen through the dark months - and that's what happened to us this year. My lovely saladisi, a mix of cut-and-come-again leaves, have not been strong enough to stand repeated pickings, and they would have been if I had sown them three weeks earlier. The kale, too, which stands outside the kitchen window, should have been in the ground a month earlier to make strong growth before the light faded - we won't be able to start eating them until late February. It's been a steep learning curve, and we're all fed up with squash and turnips.

So last night, I tried something different - a salad made from one of those vacuum packs of beetroot. The dressing was unusual, and suggested by a half-remembered recipe written by Angelika, who writes a blog called The Flying Apple from Vienna. Vacuum-packed beetroot are normally fairly bland, but this easy salad is bursting with flavour.

I LOVE beetroot - we used to have it every Wednesday at school, pickled in harsh malt vinegar, with a slice of corned beef and a dollop of lumpy mash. For years it was my favourite comfort food, although corned beef is now firmly off our menu (it doesn't actually say on the tin how much saturated fat there is, but when you look at it you see that it must be getting on for 50%). I know that beetroot is, for many, a horror food: at school the nuns used to keep us in until we had finished everything our plates - I never went to school on a Friday afternoon, because I couldn't, just couldn't, eat the slice of Edam. Elsie McArthur never went to school at all in the afternoons, because there were all sorts of things she couldn't eat. My friend DD was a picky eater, but managed to gain her freedom most afternoons by hiding the remains in her napkin or pocket. For obvious reasons she couldn't do this on beetroot day.

All this staring at plates took place in a huge Victorian glasshouse, with a beautiful tiled floor, which was set in the old walled garden of Friar Park, an extraordinary mansion on the edge of Henley on Thames which later became the home of the Beatle George Harrison. My memories of the house are vivid but patchy - try as I may, some parts of it I just can't visualise, although others are as clear in my mind as parts of this house in which I have been living for 20 years. We must have been hanging our heads over the revolting remains, because what I remember best of all about the glasshouse is the lovely floor.

But back to the beetroot:
Slice the roots in a 250g vacuum pack. Make a dressing with a little zest from an orange, a little of the juice, a teaspoon of chilli jam (or use Thai chilli sauce if you don't make this useful and delicious fresh-tasting cross between sauce and jam), and a few drops of chilli oil. Leave to infuse for 10 minutes or so, and strew it with a pinch of Maldon salt before serving.

Aromatic prawns

Horatio and I have just eaten the most delicious Sunday evening supper - I hesitate to call it curry, because that makes you think of chilli peppers, hot hot food, and the need for dahl, iced cold water, and yoghurt. We often eat something light and fishy on a Sunday evening, which generally translates into sardines on toast, with a little yoghurt, lemon juice, and some chopped spring onions (and that's what Lucius will probably make for himself when he gets back from playing real tennis at Merton). But Horatio is the only other person in the house who seeks out curry, and as we were the only two at home this evening, it was an opportunity too good to miss.

This is a kind of korma, but without the coconut, which we don't eat, because it is full of saturated fat (I still find it difficult to understand how a plant can make saturated fat). Instead, there are ground almonds to sweeten the sauce, which has an aromatic depth of flavour from six spices.

First, chop a large onion, and sweat it gently in oil with a couple of sliced cloves of garlic. This should take 20-30 minutes, and you'll need to add a little water from time to time to stop it catching. You want soft onion, not too brown. Put the rice on to cook (one mug of basmati, two of water, cook covered until all the water is absorbed, just under 20 minutes).

While this is going on, organise your spices. In a mortar, put the seeds from two cardamom pods, half a teaspoon of fennel seeds, two cloves, half a teaspoon of cinnamon and of ginger, and some freshly grated nutmeg. Bash it with a pestle until you have a sticky rich mess.

When you are nearly ready to eat (ie, when the rice is all but cooked), add the spices to the onions, give it a good stir, and add 250g prawns. Stir, then add 2 tablespoons of ground almonds, two tablespoons of yoghurt and a glass of water (120-150ml). Simmer for five to ten minutes, until the sauce has thickened to your liking.

Even the most adamant chilli hater couldn't object to this curry. I'll make it later this week with chicken or pork - either would be good.

Onion soup

What is it about soup and the New Year? Something light and cheap after the holidays, I suppose. This was lunch the other day - onions, a little bread, some left over cheese, slowly transformed into something greater than the sum of its parts, the sweetness of the onions complementing the savoury crouton.

Peel one large onion per person, cut it in half and then slice as finely as possible. Fry on the lowest heat in the least possible amount of olive oil, stirring every so often, for half an hour or more, until the onions are melting and beginning to brown. Then add liquid. This can be water or stock. Either will do. If it is water, then a little flavouring wouldn't come amiss - say, a little wine, perhaps there's some brandy left over from the Christmas cake, a little balsamic vinegar, any of those three bubbled up before adding water sparingly. Or stock, but only if you've made it. (I find this takes very little effort: say, two minutes twice, spread over several hours - washing up the pan takes more.) Simmer the soup gently for 20-30 minutes, until the onion is meltingly tender and all the flavours are amalgamated.

When it's ready, toast some bread, add cheese, grill. We used cheddar for the children, stilton for the adults.

Serve in shallow soup plates, and float the rarebit on top.

Variations would include adding thyme, or cinnamon, or nutmeg. But what makes this so delicious is its simplicity (it's hardly a recipe, more a reminder), so probably best not to try too many variations.

Lettice's mushroom sauce for pasta

Lettice made lunch yesterday, a delicious new pasta sauce adapted from Antonio Carluccio's Italian Feast, which she bought with her Christmas money a couple of years ago. It's the first time she's used it - but then, on Christmas Eve, Lucius finally let off the rocket he was given by Eleanor for Christmas 2005 (and, yes, it was worth the wait - it made a satisfyingly loud whoosh and went very high, and it is said to have taken an aerial photograph, but this has not yet been processed). This sauce is thickened with ground almonds, rather than cream or yoghurt.

Soak 10g dried mushrooms (porcini for choice) in 150ml water. After a quarter of an hour, squeeze them dry, and keep the liquid.

Fry a small chopped onion in a little olive oil until it is soft, but not browned. Add 300g sliced mushrooms (wild if possible, otherwise as interesting a mixture as you can buy). Fry for a couple of minutes, then stir in the soaking liquid, 6 tablespoons of milk, 25g ground almonds and a tablespoon of finely chopped parsley.

Add the sauce to pasta. AC's suggestion is open ravioli, using home-made pasta; we plan to do this one day soon, because making pasta is such fun, but in the meantime, we used this to dress bought pasta - those curly tubes, I think. Alfred refused to eat it. All the more for the rest of us.

Mulled wine for a Happy Christmas!

We had a party last night, for friends, neighbours, and relations. Twelve families, children of all ages, from five to 20-something, a few grandparents, parents getting away from last-minute chores. Lovely sound of happy chatter, the youngest children offering round things to eat - sausages, crisps, dips (I made a taramasalata, but it turned out too oniony for my taste), tiny baked potatoes, shavings of parmesan and of salami. And the whole house smelled of Christmas - spices from the mulled wine.

For each 75 cl bottle of wine (I used a merlot I bought from the Wine Society), add 75ml of sugar, 1 tsp of cloves, 1 cinammon stick broken into two or three pieces, the juice of one lemon and one orange (or, when it runs out, and you have to make more in a hurry, the juice of a couple of clementines). Stir until the sugar dissolves, then heat gently. In an ideal world, you should strain this into a jug - but we didn't have time.

Happy days!

A Christmassy pilaf

We ate this with roast chicken the other night, and it was essence of Christmas - easy celebratory food with a hint of the exotic which is just right on a winter's night. And I got there by accident: normally, for this sort of dish I would use individual spices, probably cinnamon and clove, but I wanted to finish up what was left over from baking Christmas cakes last week, and the result was a much greater depth of flavour. The ingredients list says: cinnamon, coriander seed, caraway, nutmeg, ginger and cloves. No wonder.

Perfect to go with cold turkey on Boxing Day - five minute's effort, then 20 minutes to do something else before it's time to eat.

Chop and fry a large onion until golden in a little olive oil. Use a saucepan with lid. Add 100g pistachio nuts, & 100g of dried berries. I used a bought mixture of cranberries, blueberries and wild cherry, but any of those would do, or raisins if that's what was in the cupboard. Then add a couple of teaspoons of mixed spice. Stir all this round for a moment, add 500g basmati rice, and then add 750ml stock, bring to the boil, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes without lifting the lid.

When it's done, the rice will be at the bottom, everything else at the top. Mix it together and, if you are decanting it into a serving dish, scrape up the crunchy bits at the bottom and mix those in too.

Marzipan

Amazingly, I made marzipan yesterday. Not something I've ever done before. Quick, easy, and much much nicer than the stuff in the packet. It's extraordinary how we have let the supermarkets make us think they are improving our lives, when the smallest effort to cook from scratch proves the opposite.

You need 250g of ground almonds, 250g of icing sugar, and one medium egg. You mix them together in a large bowl. That's it.

My children all say that they don't like marzipan. I gave them a little piece of the freshly-made home-made version, and they all said it tasted of almonds, in the tone of voice that suggested that this was a revelation. And they liked it.

I've got a packet I bought last year and didn't use. This is what it contains: sugar, almonds (25%), glucose syrup, colour lutein. I've got no idea what colour lutein is (except that I know enough gardening latin to work out that it is probably yellow), and I wouldn't want to use it in my kitchen. What a lot of sugar - and the fact that there's so much makes me wonder about the quality of the almonds they have used. The use-by date is June 2007 - I think mine will be eaten up by the middle of next week.

A really good squash risotto

Finally, a pumpkin risotto to please Lucius, who doesn't like squash. Just as well, because I grew more pumpkins than ever this year, AND the veg box turns up one or two most weeks, so there's a bit of a pumpkin mountain in this house. If you don't much like the texture of pumpkin, which I think is the problem for many people, you can mash it into the rice. Lovely winter comfort food.

Making it is very simple, the usual risotto drill, using a lot of red wine, and adding baked pumpkin at the end.

Peel and chunk a pumpkin - mine was a lovely pale green one from the veg box. Roast in a hot oven for half an hour or so, until they begin to brown at the edges.

Gently fry some chopped onion in olive oil. Just as they are about to brown, add a little garlic. Add risotto rice, stir for a few moments, then bubble up a glass of red wine - put about twice what you'd normally use. Slowly add stock (I used a very rich pheasant stock flavoured with cloves, which almost certainly contributed to the success). When it's almost done, add the pumpkin, and some finely chopped rosemary (sage would be a good alternative here). You'll almost certainly need to add a little more stock, because this risotto is better for being pretty liquid. Stir in a little finely grated parmesan.

I planned to serve it with a little pesto-y mess made with the roasted pumpkin seeds, but they were too tough to eat, so we ate it unadorned. Next time.

Spicy squid stew

In yesterday's Times, there was a recipe by Lindsay Bareham for squid stew, in which she said that you could buy frozen squid in 1kg boxes in Waitrose. I've tried to do this before, egged on by Nigella, without success. So I thought I'd try again. No luck, but they did have some squid on the deli counter. I didn't use the Times recipe, except as the inspiration. This is what I did.


Chop a couple of onions and a stick of celery, and soften in olive oil. Add some garlic. At this point I crumbled in a dried chilli, which gave the finished dish a strong but not overpowering heat; Lucius and Horatio would have preferred it without, and that would be good too. Add half a glass of red wine and bubble up, then add a tin of tomatoes and some chunks of potato (I used a peeled floury potato, which I had to be careful not to overcook; waxy new potatoes would be better, but that's for next summer). Simmer for 10-15 minutes to make a rich stew.

Meanwhile, cut up a chorizo sausage into wedges, and fry them in a little olive oil. Pour the sausage and the oil into the stew.

Roughly cut 500g squid, leaving the tentacles intact, and add them to the mix. Cover and simmer for 5-10 minutes until they are cooked.

Chop some herbs and strew over the finished dish. Serve with bread (the slow but simple white loaf would be ideal).

Mushroom daube

This started when I consulted the blue River Cafe book because there were a lot of mushrooms in my veg box this week.

Fry a medium box of fresh sliced mushrooms in olive oil. Meanwhile soak a couple of handfuls of dried mushrooms in very hot water (you want to end up with less rehydrated mushrooms, so that they don't overwhelm the more delicate flavours of the fresh ones). When the fresh mushrooms are brown, put them in a shallow dish. Drain and reserve the water from the rehydrated mushrooms, and fry in a little more olive oil with some crushed garlic. When the garlic begins to brown, add the delicious mushroom water, and braise until most of the liquid has evaporated.

So far so River Cafe. It tasted so-so, so I added a little Marsala and boiled that down too. Much better.

Back to the recipe: stir the two mushrooms together, and add chopped herbs before serving.

Delicious, quick, and easy.

Slow but simple bread

This fabulous white loaf is a revelation - a beautiful ball of bread dusted with semolina, and with a light airy open texture that costs pounds in the supermarket. All for pennies, a couple of minute's work, no kneading - and eaten so fast that there was no time to take a photograph.

It came from a food blog I discovered this week, via the New York Times website. You have to sign in to the website, which is a bit of a bore, but once you get to the right page you'll find a little film of Jim Lahey from Sullivan Street Bakery explaining his method. The problem for UK cooks is that it's all in cup measures, so I've translated it into metric.


Put 360g of ordinary flour into a large bowl. I used my all-purpose flour, which is lovely soft Italian type "00" from Waitrose - the exact opposite of the strong flour you are "supposed" to use for breadmaking. Add 1/4 tsp of instant yeast and 1 1/4 tsp salt. Mix with 300ml warm water. It will be a shaggy, sticky mess. Cover the bowl (I used a plate) and leave in a warm place for at least 12 hours. Jim Lahey says 18-20 hours is best; I left mine for about 36hrs.

By this time the dough will look bubbled. Strew a little flour on a work surface and turn the dough out. Now fold it on itself a couple of times - this is a much gentler action than kneading. Cover with the upturned bowl and leave for 15 minutes.

Get a clean teacloth and strew it with a little polenta or semolina. Shape the dough into a ball, put it on one half of the cloth, and cover it with the other half. Leave this to rise for two hours.

Half an hour before it's fully risen, put a lidded casserole dish in a very hot oven - 230C if your oven will do it. The casserole can be metal, ceramic or glass; I used a small Le Creuset pan. You don't need to grease it, the bread won't stick. When it's really hot, and the dough is risen, take the pan out of the oven and turn the dough into it (don't worry too much what it looks like at this point), replace the lid and bake for half an hour. Then take off the lid and bake for 5-10 minutes more.


There are two reasons for the success of this slightly startling recipe - the first is that time replaces the need to knead; the second is that covering the dough in a hot pan is as close to a commercial steam oven as you can get in an ordinary domestic kitchen.

Timing is easy - mix the dough in the afternoon or evening, and bake in the morning.