The Kitchen Diaries II

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a handful of chopped parsley

olive oil

Soak the beans in cold water overnight to plump them up. The next day, drain and rinse them, then bring to the boil in deep water, together with the bay leaves and a good glug of olive oil. Boil hard for ten minutes, then reduce the heat so they simmer merrily till they are just tender yet retain their shape and some bite – a matter of thirty to thirty-five minutes or so. Drain the beans in a colander and set aside.

Season the lamb shanks and lightly colour them in a little oil – 2 tablespoons should do – in a heavy-based casserole. Once they are pale gold, remove them, but leave their cooking fat behind. Peel the onions, cut them in half and then cut each half into thick segments. Let these soften in the pan over a medium heat, adding a little more oil if there is less than a couple of spoonfuls of fat left. As the onions soften, add the thyme sprigs and the garlic. When all is soft and translucent, stir in the flour and leave to colour lightly for two or three minutes. Gradually stir in the stock to make a thick, oniony sauce. Set the oven at 180°C/Gas 4.

Tip the drained cooked beans in with the onions, then tuck in the lamb and any juices from the plate and season with salt and black pepper. Simmer for thirty minutes, partially covered with a lid, stirring from time to time to check the beans are not sticking. Add more stock if you feel it needs it, then remove from the heat.

Mix the breadcrumbs and parsley with 3 or 4 tablespoons of olive oil, then scatter them over the top of the casserole. Cover loosely with foil, transfer to the oven and cook for an hour and a half or until the meat can be persuaded to part company from its bones. Remove the foil and cook for a further ten to fifteen minutes to let the crust crisp up.

Enough for 4

Getting passion fruit right

The passion fruit offers us the crunch of a hundred seeds, a dab of golden jelly surrounding each one and a little (very little) piercing saffron juice. Sour, sweet, soft, crisp, the passion fruit gives us a hit of bracing freshness to brighten a grey day.

The dark, spherical fruit is most usually sold unripe – that is, completely smooth, a dull purple mauve, either in packs of four from the supermarket or loose in a cardboard box from the greengrocer’s. Keep them till the skin has thinned and its surface is covered with dimples, like a golf ball. Like us, the passion fruit is better for a few wrinkles.

As your fruits progress towards ripeness, their skin will shrivel and become a little brittle. Though small, they should feel heavy for their size. Lightness is generally an indication of dryness within. Catch it before the casing collapses on one side, which is the fruit’s last gasp.

Eaten too early, the passion fruit has an astringency that will remind you of the pomegranate, and the juice will be watery and pale. Kept till ripe, it will give you intense fruit flavours and bright, clean, fresh-tasting juice and seeds, to be eaten first thing on a cold morning, with a teaspoon, like a boiled egg. A little cup of sunshine.

This morning the greengrocer has a box of them that are spot on (I have a feeling they were about to be thrown out). I get them cheap and use their knife-sharp juice to make tiny pots of golden cream no bigger than espresso cups. Just four or five teaspoons per person with which to end tonight’s dinner.

Passion fruit creams

passion fruit: 16

double cream: 500ml

caster sugar: 150g

lemon juice: 35ml

Cut the passion fruit in half and scrape out the seeds and juice into a small sieve balanced over a measuring jug or bowl. Let the juice from the fruit drip through, then rub the seeds against the sieve with a teaspoon to get as much of the pulp through as you can. Set the juice aside in a cool place and reserve the seeds for later.

Put the cream and caster sugar in a saucepan and bring to the boil, stirring occasionally to dissolve the sugar. Lower the heat and leave to bubble for three minutes, stirring from time to time. Put the lemon juice in a measuring jug and make the quantity up to 75ml with the reserved passion fruit juice. Keep the remaining juice cold.

Remove the cream mixture from the heat, stir in the lemon and passion fruit juice and leave to settle for a few minutes. Pour into 6 or 8 espresso cups or very small glasses. I like to stir a few of the reserved passion fruit seeds into the mixture for a contrast in texture (say, half a dozen per cup) but that is up to you. Cool, then refrigerate for at least a couple of hours.

Just before you serve the creams, spoon a little puddle of the passion fruit juice over the top. As each diner digs in with their teaspoon, the juice will trickle down into the depths of the cream.

Makes 6–8 espresso cups

MARCH 6

Beans on toast again

Being compiled from my dog-eared, chaotic notebooks rather than a meticulously kept and chronologically perfect diary means that many of my everyday meals, those I tend to do almost on autopilot, rarely get their fifteen minutes in the limelight. This is a shame because they are often jolly good eating.

Such meals tend to get taken for granted, like very close friends. One of my favourite quick fixes has always been beans on toast. I like the sweet commercial sauce and the thick toast, which, just for the record, I always butter. The joy of richly sauced beans and hot toast is not confined to the turquoise tin though, and I often make a home-made version, with cans of beans that I put in my own sauce, stirring in bacon, mushrooms or whatever is to hand (chorizo and black pudding are favourite additions).

Today, even with my woolly hat on (I now have three, and every one of them makes me look as stupid as the other), the biting-cold wind is making my ears numb. The idea of going home to sweet, sticky beans with a wodge of warm sourdough bread appeals more than almost anything I can think of. I could cop out with my mate Heinz, embellishing them with chilli or Marmite, or even a bit of bacon, but instead decide to take an extra thirty minutes to make a down-home version. It does the trick.

Beans on toast

A little more trouble than opening a can, but much more satisfying when you have the time.

lardons or cubed bacon or pancetta: 200g

an onion

a little rapeseed or olive oil

a rib of celery

carrots: 2 small to medium

chopped tomatoes: two 400g cans

canned beans (pinto, haricot, butter beans etc): two 400g cans

black treacle: 1 teaspoon

a lump of sourdough loaf

Fry the lardons in a deep pan over a moderate heat. Peel and roughly chop the onion. When the lardons and their fat are golden, add the onion, together with a little rapeseed or olive oil if there seems too little fat in the pan. Chop the celery and carrots, add to the pan and leave to cook for a full five minutes, till fragrant and starting to soften. Add the tomatoes, simmer for ten minutes, then stir in the drained beans and simmer for another ten minutes. Season with the treacle, a little black pepper and some salt.

Warm the bread in the oven, tear into chunks and serve with the beans.

Enough for 2

MARCH 7

A tropical marinade and a shoal of sea bass

For some time now I have been curious about glass, and why some is more beautiful to look at, and look through, than others. Windows made from old ‘crown’ glass have soft waves and little bubbles, like tiny seeds to catch the light, while drinking glasses that are uneven in the hand, with ripples and furrows, make the water within sparkle. Small things, but they matter to me. I like drinking water from a hand-made tumbler with dimples and folds.

Aesthetics aside, glass is a useful object in the kitchen because it has a neutral effect on the food we put in it. Unlike aluminium, glass is unaffected by acid ingredients such as rhubarb, lemon and vinegar. Leave a batch of poached rhubarb in a glass bowl and it will taste the same after a night or two in the fridge. Use aluminium and your fruit will have taken on an unpleasant taint from the dish. It is one of the reasons glass has been used for centuries for storing acid-based preserves such as pickles and relishes.

I also use glass to marinate meat and fish. Not only is it non-reactive but you can see the changes taking place in the food more easily. Make a ceviche in a glass dish and you can see whether the fish has turned opaque from the lime juice. I can’t be the only person who finds measuring liquid in a glass jug more accurate than in one made from china. I particularly like making the classic lemon surprise pudding in a Pyrex bowl so I can see the distinct layers of sponge and lemon sauce.

Today I work on a recipe for a television programme for next Christmas (such is the life of a cookery writer). It is not my recipe, but comes via The Rebel Dining Society. It’s fresh, clean, smart and uses up the rest of the passion fruit.

A ceviche of sea bass and passion fruit

passion fruit: 4

limes: 2

an orange

a vanilla pod

sea bass fillets: 4

a red chilli

a small yellow or orange chilli

chives: 4 or 5, snipped into short pieces

coriander leaves: a small handful

Squeeze the juice of the passion fruit, seeds and all, plus the limes and the orange into a bowl. Scrape in the seeds of the vanilla pod and mix gently.

Skin the sea bass fillets, then cut the flesh into thin slivers and arrange them neatly on a large plate or in a glass bowl. Pour over the juice, almost submerging the fish. Scatter over very fine slices of red and yellow chilli and cover the plate with a piece of cling film. The sea bass will be ‘cooked’ by the acidity in the dressing, so leave in the fridge for a good three or four hours or even overnight. Scatter the chives and coriander leaves over the fish and serve.

Enough for 4 as part of a light lunch

MARCH 8

A jar of capers

The door of the fridge holds many treasures, but mostly rows of opened jars. Today the list is typical: a bottle of Vietnamese chilli paste, a block of tamarind, two packets of butter, a tube of harissa paste and another of wasabi, a bottle of damson gin and a jar of damson jam, two opened jars of marmalade, four bottles of tonic water, a bottle of apple juice I use for my breakfast smoothies, a bottle of Vietnamese fish sauce and another of rice wine, four bottles of sparkling Norwegian mineral water and a jar of salted capers. Of course, the capers don’t need refrigerating, but the oversized fridge has become the modern-day larder.

Capers generally come in brine or salt. The latter is considered to be better, mostly because the capers are plumper and, although salty, the seasoning stays on the outside and can be washed off – unlike the brined version, where the capers soak up the salt-water solution like little sponges. Their qualities of sourness and salt tend to polarise people, but they are without doubt one of the most used seasonings in my kitchen, finding their way into sauces for steak and fish, a dressing for many a salad, and tossed with warm, partially melted butter for a pasta sauce.

The caper is the cook’s first call for piquancy. Bitter, sharp and salty, it has the ability to bring out the flavour of any ingredient it is partnered with. A dull nugget that makes other flavours shine. Generally, I suggest a caper is only warmed, never cooked, as it can become inedibly bitter, though once it is dunked in a pool of tomato sauce on a pizza the average caper is probably fairly safe.

The caper is a flower bud, pickled or salted before it becomes a small, creamy-white flower. Italian ones are probably the best known but they are grown in Morocco and Turkey too. Caper berries, incidentally, are fatter than capers – almost the size of an olive – and are eaten with their stalk, with a distinctive crunch to them. They are the fruit of the caper bush that is produced after the buds have flowered.

Despite all the culinary partnerships that intrigue or delight, there are very few that actually make the mouth water. Mouthwatering, that overused term that I have banned from any piece of writing or programme that bears my name, is a particular horror of mine, like the word ‘crispy’. Yet occasionally the word is accurate, such as when it is used to describe the partnership of capers with lemon. A recipe for culinary fireworks. The two have almost magical powers when they appear with fish.

Sea bass with rosemary and capers

sea bass: 2 small ones, cleaned

new potatoes: 500g

olive oil

rosemary: 4 bushy sprigs

a long, hot red chilli

sherry vinegar: a tablespoon

capers: a tablespoon, rinsed

the juice of a small lemon

garlic: 2 cloves

parsley: 4 large sprigs

a lemon, to serve

Set the oven at 200°C/Gas 6. Rinse the fish and wipe them dry with paper towel.

Peel the potatoes, then cut them into slices about the thickness of a pound coin. Warm a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a large, shallow pan or roasting tin set over a moderate to low heat and slide in the potatoes. Let them cook slowly until their edges are starting to colour – a matter of ten minutes. It is worth stirring them and turning them over now and again, so they don’t stick to the pan.