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salt and freshly ground black pepper
Mix the mashed potato thoroughly with the eggs and return to the fridge to firm up. Form the mixture into little cakes, about 5cm/2 inches in diameter and 1cm/
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inch thick, and coat them in flour. Heat a thin layer of oil in a frying pan, add the potato cakes and shallow-fry over a medium heat for about 5 minutes on each side, until lightly browned.
Meanwhile, heat the watercress, crème-fraîche and egg yolk together in a small pan, whisking gently. Remove from the heat before it boils and season to taste. Serve the potato cakes with the sauce poured around the edge.
smoked trout potato cakes
Follow the above recipe, mixing 2 flaked fillets of hot-smoked trout into the mashed potato, together with 2 chopped hard-boiled eggs, if you like. These fishcakes are very good with the watercress sauce.
bubble and squeak
What more can be said about a classic leftovers hash? Except that I add egg yolks for richness, which is not authentic but very good. You can leave them out, if you prefer.
240g/8oz leftover cooked cabbage
/
quantity of mashed potato (see here (#ucc7fa1d5-eada-4879-bcaa-4dad3c9807fd))
2–4 leftover egg yolks
3 tablespoons dripping
Mix the cabbage, potato and egg yolks together. Heat the dripping in a large frying pan, add the potato mixture and fry over a medium-low heat on both sides, until it forms a crisp cake that is hot all the way through.
kitchen note
You can use the same method with all the brassica family, whether the much-maligned Brussels sprout or the ultra-chic Italian cavolo nero. You can also use cooked leeks, anything from the squash family, or sweetcorn – a hash is a hash.
salad potatoes
Salad potatoes are small with firm skins. They are available all year round, and while it is always the right move to buy British during our own new-potato season – from April to July – imported types can be fine when there are no home-grown to be had. Varieties omnipresent in supermarkets are Charlotte and Nicola but do seek out the rarer breeds, too. These include La Ratte, Pink Fir Apple, Belle de Fontenay, Duke of York and Kestrel (see the Shopping Guide). Organic salad potatoes are grown slowly, a factor that no doubt accounts for their deeper flavour. Cook more than you need and use them to help other meals happen. Don’t confuse year-round salad potatoes with specialist seasonal types like the papery-skinned Jersey Royals, which begin to arrive in Britain as early as February, or their Cornish early equivalent.
potato salad
This is the best salad to eat with cold ham or beef. The sweeter the onions, the better it will taste. If you can find Breton or Roscoff onions – they are still sold in strings – so much the better. So-called banana shallots, which are in fact onions, make a good substitute.
Serves 4
1kg/2
/
lb salad potatoes
1 teaspoon salt
6 shallots, or pink Roscoff onions if you can find them, sliced
Mayonnaise (see here (#litres_trial_promo))
Put the potatoes in a pan, cover with water and add the salt. Bring to the boil and cook until just tender – they should still be waxy in the centre when you cut them open. Drain and leave to cool, then slice thickly. Put them in a bowl and add the shallots and enough mayonnaise to coat. Mix well.
the freezer
Before you run screaming from the room, I am not about to make you cook for the freezer. I do freeze extra food, but not great bags of every type of vegetable and fruit, which only become soggy and tasteless when defrosted. I make a few shepherd’s and fish pies, and braised meat stews and sauces to store in the freezer. Otherwise I prefer to cook from stored ingredients. However, there are foods that are ideal for freezing: peas, broad beans and spinach come to mind. Sweetcorn freezes well – so much better for the children than canned – as do all red berries apart from strawberries.
broad beans
Frozen broad beans have to be used in a certain way because one of their weakest points serves them very well in the freezer. The pale skin that surrounds the inner, podded bean toughens unpleasantly but in doing so protects the flesh of the bean from the ice crystals that make most frozen vegetables go soggy. Broad beans are inexpensive, so the method that follows is not as wasteful as it seems.
Defrost the beans in a colander and put them in a pan. Pour over boiling water and reheat to boiling point. Drain, splash with plenty of cold water and then pinch off the pale skin of each bean. It doesn’t take long and you are left with beautiful bright green kernels, perfect to dress with oil and lemon juice and eat with dry-cured meat, hard-boiled eggs, soft goat’s cheese, or even quite alone.
frozen peas
A terrific vegetable, and ingredient. It is true that frozen peas often taste better than fresh, unless you can be sure that your fresh supply has been picked within two or three days. This is because fresh peas deteriorate quickly, becoming hard and starchy. It is now possible to buy organic frozen peas and petits pois. I recommend them. not least because it is an inexpensive way to eat naturally produced food (see the Shopping Guide).
Blend frozen peas with stock for an almost-instant pea soup, stir them into rice dishes, or combine them with skinned broad beans (see above), spinach, olive oil and fresh mint for a simple salad that will put the colour green into your winter food.
pea soup with potatoes and bacon
Serves 4
1 litre/1
/
pints chicken, beef or vegetable stock
2 spring onions, chopped
480g/1lb frozen peas, defrosted
150ml/
/
pint single cream or whole milk
4 rashers of unsmoked back bacon, cut into thin slivers
8 salad potatoes, boiled in their skins until just tender then
thickly sliced
leaves from 4 sprigs of dill
sea salt and white pepper
Heat the stock to boiling point and add the spring onions and peas. Bring back to the boil and simmer for 1 minute. Allow to cool for a few minutes, then liquidise with the cream or milk. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Fry the bacon over a low heat until crisp, then add the potatoes and stir to warm them through. Serve the soup in deep bowls with a large spoonful of bacon and potatoes in each. Scatter the dill on top.
frozen spinach
Defrosted slowly, frozen spinach can be as good as fresh. All the water must be squeezed out, and the spinach cooked either with plenty of butter, or heated with good olive oil to make this quick vegetable dish.
spinach with pine nuts
Serves 2
2 tablespoons pine nuts
480g/1lb frozen whole-leaf spinach, defrosted and the water
squeezed out
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
salt and freshly ground black pepper
Dry-toast the pine nuts in a frying pan until lightly browned, then set them aside in a bowl. Warm the spinach through in a pan and add the oil. Transfer to a dish, season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and scatter the pine nuts on top. Finish with the lemon juice.
canned food
Canning is ideal for certain foods, a good and pure way to store them without preservatives. It can even improve them in some cases – skipjack tuna being an example.
skipjack tuna
I could never understand why anyone would want to eat a lot of seared fresh tuna. Half the time it is dry and tasteless and, when buying it, it can be hard to tell how long it has been out of the water. What’s more, at the current rate of consumption, blue and yellow fin tuna will soon go the way of the dodo. Blue fin – the type favoured by the Japanese for top-quality sushi – is at an all-time low, while yellow fin is in serious decline. The only tuna not listed as endangered is skipjack. The standard of canned skipjack tuna varies from dubious and disgusting small flakes that look like factory-floor sweepings in unidentifiable oil, to tender fillets that, when packed in the tin, look like the cross section of an old tree trunk. This tuna is far superior and has a light texture, because it does not absorb too much oil. The unique double-cooking technique – before canning and then again when the sealed cans are heated to preserve the contents – seems to improve and tenderise the flesh. It can then simply be softly flaked into a salad or sandwich, or made into a delicately flavoured fish cake.
choosing tuna
Trawling for any fish using nets puts other wild species at risk of getting caught up in the gear, but the risk is greater to these lovely mammals when netting tuna. Check labelling on cans to be sure it contains ‘dolphin friendly’ tuna, looking for mention of monitoring by the EII (Earth Island Institute). The ‘dolphin safe’ motto you may find on cans from North and South American tuna fisheries is not, according to marine conservationists, so closely monitored. In coming years, the EII hope to develop a logo to make it easier for shoppers.
Catching tuna by pole and line is the only truly sustainable means. Not all ‘line-caught’ tuna is sustainable. Ask for hand-lined, troll-caught tuna; or tuna caught on long lines that are ‘seabird friendly’. It is currently very difficult to tell what fishing method was used for catching skipjack tuna. This is because it is a commodity – like coffee or tea – traded on a world exchange. It’s a system of trading that undermines efforts to conserve the tuna numbers. If well-managed fisheries are not rewarded, why bother? In the coming years the Marine Stewardship Council hope to certify the pole and line tuna fisheries as sustainable – watch out for their logo on tins and jars.
You can also find handline-caught albacore – a pale, delicate-fleshed relative often dubbed ‘white tuna’, and found mostly around the coast of Spain, Portugal and France (see the Shopping Guide).
Always buy tuna packed in either olive or sunflower oil, draining it away before you use the fish.
tuna cakes
Lovely, delicate cakes to eat for supper – tuna-loving children will adore them. Serve with a green sauce (see here (#u08e70ce4-258f-438b-8e51-d5cb35075e10)).
Serves 4
3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons plain flour
300ml/
/
pint milk
180g/6oz canned tuna, drained
2 shallots, finely chopped
juice of
/
lemon
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
dried breadcrumbs (see here (#u2c33e651-eef1-4889-8b52-d965765cb8aa))
sunflower oil for shallow-frying
salt and white pepper
Melt the butter in a small pan and add the flour. Cook gently for a minute, then remove from the heat. Gradually stir in the milk, then cook, stirring, until the sauce thickens and finally boils. Remove from the heat, add the tuna, stirring to break up the flakes, then add the shallots, lemon juice and Parmesan. Season with a little white pepper and the barest pinch of salt. Refrigerate the mixture until very cold, then roll it into a cylinder shape, about 4cm/1
/
inches in diameter. Cut it into pastilles 2.5cm/1 inch thick and roll each one in dried breadcrumbs. Shallow-fry the tuna cakes in sunflower oil for 3–4 minutes on each side, then drain on kitchen paper.
tuna salad with skinless tomatoes
I mix preserved tuna with lots of herbs, lemon juice, and virgin olive oil if necessary, then add black pepper and a few capers and eat it with tomatoes. The secret, by the way, of great tomato salads is skinning them. Note to the ‘time sceptics’: it takes 3 minutes to skin 4 tomatoes. This is how to do it: nick the skin of ripe tomatoes with a knife, submerge the tomatoes in boiling water for a minute, then drain and push the skins off. They have a wonderful way of homogenising the dish, absorbing the olive oil and the flavour of the herbs and allowing the tuna to stick to them.
kitchen note
Add drained, canned cannellini or haricot beans to make a more substantial plateful.
other uses for tuna
Flake tuna over a pea and broad bean salad dressed with olive oil.
