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Cold meat,
hot potatoes
There is cold meat to eat up from yesterday’s roast but it needs something warming to sit alongside. So potatoes it is, spiced with onions and chillies, all cooked to a crisp. To be honest, I let it cook for longer than I intend, with the result that the onions are crisp and slightly singed. A plate of big, mouth-popping flavours that I cool by drizzling yoghurt over at the table.
Spiced roast potatoes with yoghurt and mint
When Indian cooks bake potatoes, they tend to add spices and some sort of liquid, such as water or yoghurt, but I see no reason why you cannot add the yoghurt afterwards, which has the advantage of allowing the potatoes to crisp nicely. A moderate heat is needed here to stop the spices burning in the oven.
potatoes – 4 medium
onions – 2 medium
vegetable or groundnut oil
red chillies, as hot as you like – 2, chopped
garlic – 2 cloves, crushed
cumin seeds – half a teaspoon
ground turmeric – half a teaspoon
To finish:
natural yoghurt – 4 tablespoons
a little mild ground chilli
young mint leaves – a palmful, chopped
Peel the potatoes, cut them into the sort of pieces you would for normal roasting, then bring them to the boil in deep water. Add salt to the pot and simmer for ten to fifteen minutes, until the potatoes are approaching tenderness. You should be able to slide a knifepoint through them with almost no pressure. Drain the potatoes thoroughly, then very gently shake them in their pan so the edges fluff and ‘bruise’. Set the oven at 180°C/Gas 4.
Peel the onions and slice them finely. Heat enough oil in a roasting tin to make a thin film over the bottom. The thicker the base, the less likelihood there is of the spices burning. As the oil warms, add the sliced onions and let them soften, then stir in the chopped chillies, garlic and cumin and let them warm through, stirring (and watching like a hawk) so that they do not burn. Add the potatoes to the hot oil, add the turmeric, then slowly stir and toss the potatoes so that they are covered with the seasoned oil.
Roast the potatoes in the preheated oven until they have started to crisp. Thirty to thirty-five minutes or so should do it. You don’t want them to be as brown as classic roast potatoes. They should be golden and flecked with spice.
As the potatoes come from the oven, grind over a seasoning of salt, then spoon over the yoghurt, sprinkle with a very little mild ground chilli and scatter with the chopped mint leaves.
Enough for 4 as a side dish
February 7
Lamb
shanks to
warm the
soul
A chill day, the sky the colour of wet aluminium. I need the sort of meal that ends with everyone squishing their potatoes into the meaty, oniony sauce on their plate. A sauce that is warm rather than spicy, enriched with the goodness of meat cooked on the bone.
The butcher suggests lamb shanks, cheaper now they are not so trendy. I buy nothing else; there is wine, bay, rosemary, garlic and grain mustard in the kitchen already. The preparation will take ten minutes, the cooking an hour and a half on a low heat. A supper of melting tenderness.
Lamb shanks with mustard and mash
olive oil
lamb shanks – 2 small
onions – 4 small to medium
bay leaves – 3
sprigs of rosemary – 2 or 3
vegetable or meat stock – 250ml
red wine – 250ml
garlic – 3 cloves
grain mustard – 1 heaped tablespoon
To serve:
mashed potato and a bit more mustard
Set the oven at 160°C/Gas 3. Warm a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a roasting tin large enough to take the meat snugly, then seal the lamb on all sides in the hot oil. The fat and the cut end of the meat should take on a little colour.
Peel the onions, slice them in half from root to tip, then each half into quarters. Add them to the lamb with the bay leaves and the leaves from the rosemary sprigs. Pour in the stock and red wine. Peel the garlic cloves and squash them flat with the blade of a heavy knife. Drop them into the roasting tin with a grinding of salt and some coarse black pepper. Cover the dish with foil, place in the oven and bake for an hour and a half.
Half way through cooking, uncover the dish and stir in the mustard, turning the lamb as you do so. Cover once more and return to the oven. Serve with mashed potato and a bit more mustard.
Enough for 2
February 8
A smoked
fish supper
There is something old-fashioned about a supper of smoked haddock, something redolent of the 1950s, when women wore an apron when they cooked and would get a meal on the table at the same time each day, year in, year out. I like my smoked haddock baked with a little cream, as I do almost anything smoked, but until recently was never sure what to eat with it. Mash never seemed right, buttered toast never substantial enough, rice too reminiscent of kedgeree. It was out of curiosity that I turned to beans, pale ones from a can, their texture a pleasing contrast. Now it is one of my favourite teas, though not the prettiest.
Smoked haddock with flageolet beans and mustard
The parsley is important here and should be vivid emerald green and full of life. I see no reason why you can’t use equally mealy cannellini beans if that is what you have, though I have used butter beans before now and they were good, too. This is a mild, gently flavoured dish, consoling even, for a cold night.
smoked haddock – 400g
butter
milk – 250ml, plus a little more for later
bay leaves
flageolet beans – two 400g tins
double cream – 300ml
parsley leaves – a good fistful
grain mustard – 1 heaped tablespoon
steamed spinach, to serve
Remove the skin from the smoked haddock and place the fish in a lightly buttered baking dish. Pour over the milk, then add enough water almost to cover the fish. Tuck in a couple of bay leaves and grind over some black pepper. Bake at 200°C/Gas 6 for about fifteen to twenty minutes or until you can pull one of the large, fat flakes of flesh out with ease. Drain and discard the milk.
Rinse and re-butter the baking dish – you don’t want any bits of skin from the milk left behind. Rinse the beans in a sieve under running water, then empty them into a mixing bowl. Pour in the cream and a couple of tablespoons of milk, then chop the parsley and add it together with the mustard, a grinding of black pepper and a little salt. Go easy on the salt; smoked fish is saltier than fresh.
Spoon the beans into the dish and lay the fish on top, spooning some of the creamy beans over the top to keep it moist. Turn the oven down to 180°C/Gas 4 and bake for about forty minutes, until the cream is bubbling and the sauce has thickened around the beans. Serve with spinach.
Enough for 2
February 9
A pumpkin has been languishing in the vegetable rack for longer than I care to remember. To use it now would be more than a great satisfaction; it would be a relief.
Roast pumpkin, spicy tomato sauce
Deep red and gold, a cheering supper if ever there was one. This simple dish of roast vegetables stands or falls by the timing. I like to roast the pumpkin till it is soft but not quite collapsing, deep golden in colour, the edges slightly caramelised and sticky. Undercook it at your peril. The sauce is chunky and has a certain bitter-sweetness from the lightly blackened tomato skins. You may want to cook some brown rice to go with this, especially if you are having nothing to follow.
tomatoes – 950g
garlic – 2 cloves
chillies – 2 small hot ones
olive oil
pumpkin or squash – 1kg
Set the oven at 200°C/Gas 6. Cut the tomatoes in half and place them cut-side up on a baking sheet or in a roasting tin. Peel and finely slice the garlic, finely chop the chillies. Drizzle the tomatoes with oil, then season with salt and pepper and the garlic and chillies. Roast for forty-five to fifty minutes, till the tomatoes are soft and flecked with black.
Meanwhile, halve and peel the pumpkin. Cut into thick, melon-like slices and scoop out the seeds with a spoon. Place on a baking sheet, toss in a little olive oil and season with salt and black pepper. Roast for forty minutes, turning it over after twenty minutes or so. It is done when it is fully tender to the point of a knife and nice and sticky on the cut edges.
Roughly chop the tomatoes to give a coarse ‘sauce’. Serve alongside the roasted pumpkin, with brown rice if you wish.
Enough for 2 as a main dish
February 11
Dinner is a couple of tins of Heinz baked beans, tarted up with finely chopped chillies, several shakes of Tabasco and mushroom ketchup, and a tablespoon of black treacle. It will do.
There is no set time for eating in our house, there never has been. One day lunch will be at twelve noon, the next four in the afternoon. Supper can be as early as six and as late as midnight. Neither is our eating always leisurely. Sometimes it is just a question of getting food inside you.
Many is the time supper has been sausage sandwiches all round, either with a jar of mustard on the table, or, if I can be bothered, a pot of wasabi mayonnaise, made by beating the jade green spice-paste from its tube into some commercial mayonnaise. The sausages will be hot and sticky and the mayo shockingly spicy. The general heat is tempered by soft bread cut thick and bottles of cold beer. Other times it may be pepperoni pizzas delivered by bike or sushi or sashimi from town. Just occasionally supper will come out of a bottle.
But there are also occasions when supper is nothing at all. From a health perspective this is probably not to be recommended, but frankly that is sometimes just what I need. A lot of water will pass my lips, but no food.
For the most part, I eat one decent meal a day and then some other stuff. Under which you can file beans on toast, bacon sandwiches, fish-fingers, cheese on toast, more cheese on toast and shop-bought sushi. Sourdough bread dunked into olive oil has been dinner on more than one occasion, as have slices of rye bread with a bit of smoked salmon. Other times I just stand at the fridge eating up the remains of meals past. Cold risotto is quite nice after the initial shock, though not as much fun as cold apple pie.
But I will tell you the best trick for making your bacon sandwich, cold sausage or bit of day-old fridge-rice take on an instant appeal. Have it with a glass of wine, better still a glass of Champagne. Yes, a scavenged supper can be made to sing with pickles or fresh, rough-textured chutney, but nothing works quite as well as a glass of wine.
February 12
Another
smoked fish
supper
At the far end of the fishmonger’s slab are the smoked goods: the primrose-coloured haddock and golden mackerel; the elegantly proportioned trout, and the brick-coloured lumps of cod’s roe. There are also kippers, their skin shining silver, gold and black. Sometimes I buy one to cook for a lone supper, a slice of butter melting on its mahogany flesh. Other times, with more to feed, I make fishcakes, plump ones the size of a yo-yo.
Kipper patties, dill mayonnaise
I make these little golden fishcakes as a change from the more traditional haddock version, usually in the winter when smoky flavours seem particularly appropriate. Parsley sauce isn’t right with the kippers, so I make a dill-flavoured mayonnaise instead, or sometimes have them with nothing more than a big squeeze of lemon and a generous helping of greens.
floury potatoes – 500g
butter – a thick slice
kipper fillets – 440g
dill – a small handful, chopped
flour for dusting
shallow groundnut oil for frying
For the sauce:
chopped dill – 2 heaped tablespoons
a crushed clove of garlic
mayonnaise – 6 heaped tablespoons
