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butter: a thick slice, about 25g
smoked bacon: 120g
celeriac: 800g (1 large root)
thyme: the leaves from 3 small sprigs
chicken or vegetable stock: 500ml
water: 1 litre
grain mustard: 4 teaspoons
parsley: a small bunch
Peel the onions and roughly chop them. Melt the butter in a large, heavy-based saucepan and add the onions. Let them cook for ten to fifteen minutes or so, till translucent. As they cook, cut the bacon into short strips or dice and add them to the pan. Leave over a moderate heat, stirring occasionally, till the bacon fat is pale gold and the onions are soft.
While the onions and bacon are cooking, peel and coarsely grate the celeriac. Stir it into the onions, add the thyme leaves and a little salt, then pour in the stock and water. Bring to the boil, lower the heat and cover with a lid. Leave to simmer for thirty minutes, then stir in the mustard. Chop the parsley and add it to the soup with a seasoning of salt and black pepper. Simmer for five minutes, then remove from the heat.
Remove half the soup and blitz in a blender or food processor till almost smooth. You may need to do this in several batches, so as not to overfill the blender jug. Return the liquidised soup to the remaining soup in the saucepan. You will probably find the result is creamy enough, but if you wish to add some cream, then this is the point at which to do it. Check the seasoning and serve.
Enough for 6
JANUARY 2
A bunch of parsley
Few herbs have much to offer in winter, save bay. Even that is more aromatic when it is dried. They need the heat of the sun to concentrate the aromatic oils that lurk in their leaves and, sometimes, their stems. Parsley, though, has plenty of flavour even in the dead of winter, unless it has frozen in the ground. Parsley heals (John Gerard, the sixteenth-century herbalist, used it to quell stomach complaints) and has a high vitamin C content. Where basil stirs the senses, parsley brings us back to earth.
There is much talk about parsley stems and where they are useful. I don’t mind them in a leaf salad if they are fine and young, no thicker than a needle, but I don’t include them in ‘chopped parsley’, rough or otherwise. The stem occasionally carries an inherent bitterness and can be string-like too. Fastidiously stripping the leaves from their stems is something worth doing.
The stalks add a pleasing mineral quality to stock and soup (they possess a long tap root, like horseradish, that can stretch a foot or more into the earth) but you might prefer to add them towards the end of cooking, otherwise they will introduce a cabbagy note. Twenty minutes is time enough.
Wasted in its usual role as a garnish, if not downright pointless, this biennial, slow-germinating herb prefers rich soil, ideally slightly alkaline. Liking a little shade and winter shelter, it does well in my dampest bed, under the medlar tree. You can grow it from seed if you have the patience. I ‘rescue’ large pots of it from the supermarket and plant it in the garden just as others rescue battery hens.
There is little of interest in the cupboards and the fridge is as bare as I have seen it. But there is a granite-like lump of Parmesan in an airtight box in the fridge, a packet of rice in the cupboard and therefore the possibility of risotto. Parsley makes a surprisingly luxurious addition to rice as long as you are generous with the butter and cheese.
A parsley risotto with Parmesan crisps
Timing wise, you can manage to give the risotto its last ladle of stock, then start on the crisps. They will stay warm and crisp(ish) for long enough.
flat-leaf parsley: a good 50g
hot stock (chicken, turkey, vegetable at a push): a litre
a shallot or very small onion
butter: a thick slice
Arborio rice: 300g
a small glass of white wine or vermouth
To finish:
butter and grated Parmesan
For the Parmesan crisps:
finely grated Parmesan: 4 heaped tablespoons
Prepare the parsley. Pull the leaves from their stems, crack the stems with the back of a knife – their mineral scent is worth inhaling – then put them in a pan with the stock and bring to the boil. As the stock boils, turn the heat down to a low simmer. Finely chop the parsley leaves.
Peel and very finely chop the shallot and let it cook in the butter in a saucepan, without taking on any colour. Add the rice, turn the grains briefly in the butter till glossy, then pour in the wine and let it cook for a minute or two. Add a ladle of the stock. Stirring almost constantly, add another ladle of stock and continue to stir until the rice has soaked it all up. Now add the remaining stock, a ladle at a time, stirring pretty much all the time till the rice has soaked up the stock, the grains are plump and the texture creamy.
Stir in the chopped parsley, a thick slice of butter and a couple of handfuls of grated Parmesan. Season carefully.
For the Parmesan crisps, simply put heaped tablespoons of the grated Parmesan into a warm, non-stick frying pan. Press the cheese down flat with a palette knife and leave to melt. As soon as it has melted, turn once and continue cooking for a minute or so. Lift off with the palette knife and cool briefly. They will probably crisp up in seconds. Place on top of the risotto and serve.
Enough for 4
JANUARY 3
A crisp salad for a winter’s day
There are some pears and cheese left from Christmas, a couple of heads of crisp, hardy salad leaves still in fine fettle, and a plastic box of assorted sprouted seeds in the fridge. I put them together almost in desperation, yet what results is a salad that is both refreshing and uplifting, clean tasting and bright.
A salad of pears and cheese with sprouted seeds
Crisp, mild, light and fresh, this is the antidote to the big-flavoured salad. I prefer to use hard, glassy-fleshed pears straight from the fridge for this, rather than the usual ripe ones. Any sprouted seeds can be used, such as radish seeds, sunflower or mung beans. The easy-to-find bags of mixed sprouts are good here, too. The cheese is up to you. Something with a deep, fruity flavour is probably best, though I have used firm goat’s cheeses on occasion too. Rather than slicing it thickly, I remove shavings from the cheese with a vegetable peeler. A sort of contemporary ploughman’s lunch.
crisp pears: 2
bitter leaves such as frisée or trevise: 4 handfuls
firm, fruity cheese such as Berkswell: 150g
assorted sprouts (radish, alfalfa, sunflower, amaranth, etc.): a couple of handfuls
For the dressing:
natural yoghurt: 150ml
olive oil: 2 tablespoons
herbs, such as chervil, parsley, chives: a handful
Put the yoghurt into a bowl and whisk in the olive oil and a little salt and black pepper. Chop the herbs and stir them into the yoghurt.
Halve the pears, remove the cores and slice the pears thinly, then add them to the herb and yoghurt dressing.
Put the salad leaves in a serving dish. Pile the pears and their dressing on top. Using a vegetable peeler, shave off small, thin slices of the cheese and scatter them over the salad with the assorted sprouted seeds.
Enough for 2
JANUARY 5
Twelfth Night
The day that precedes Twelfth Night is often the darkest in my calendar. The sadness of taking down The Tree, packing up the mercury glass decorations in tissue and cardboard and rolling up the strings of tiny lights has long made my heart sink. Today I descend further than usual.
The rain is torrential and continuous. I clean the bedroom cupboards, make neat piles of books and untidy ones of clothes ready for the charity shop and make a list of major and minor jobs to do in the house over the next few months.
The local council collects discarded Christmas trees and recycles them for compost. I keep mine at home, cutting every branch from the main stem with secateurs and packing them into sacks. Over the next few weeks, the needles will fall and end their days around the blueberries and cloudberries in the garden. There is much that appeals about this annual cycle of the tree going back into the earth.
You would think that this day of darkness would be predictable enough for me to organise something to lift the spirits – dinner with friends or a day away from home. But the consequences of evergreens left in the house after Twelfth Night is too great a risk, even though this superstition is quite recent. So a day of dark spirits it is.
JANUARY 6
Epiphany
After yesterday’s darkness and self-indulgence, I open the kitchen door to find the garden refreshed after the rain. The air is suddenly sweet and clean, you can smell the soil, and the ivy and yew are shining bright. The dead leaves are blown away, the sky clear and white. There is a new energy and I want to cook again.
Today is an important day for those who grow their vegetables bio-dynamically, when the Three Kings preparation – a stir-up containing gold, frankincense and myrrh – is ground for an hour, then made into a paste with rain or pond water and offered to the land. Jane Scotter at Fern Verrow, the Herefordshire farmer from whom I buy the vegetables I cannot grow for myself (for which read most), says it smells ‘like a fine fruity Christmas cake’. ‘We do this to invite elemental life forces to help and guide us for the coming growing season. We ask for good things to happen and give the preparation as an offering to the earth and to give thanks for what the universe provides. It is a lovely thing to do and a chance to walk around the farm on a route not usually taken, holding thoughts of thanks and wishes to the farm on a spiritual level.’
Hippy-dippy hocus-pocus it may sound, but I have far less of a problem believing in this than I do many of the religious ceremonies practised by millions. Actually, much less so.
My energy and curiosity may be renewed but the larder isn’t. There is probably less food in the house than there has ever been. I trudge out to buy a few chicken pieces and a bag of winter greens to make a soup with the spices and noodles I have in the cupboard. What ends up as dinner is clear, bright and life-enhancing. It has vitality (that’s the greens), warmth (ginger, cinnamon) and it is economical and sustaining too. I suddenly feel ready for anything the New Year might throw at me.
Chicken noodle broth
chicken pieces and wings: 400g
black peppercorns: 8
star anise: 2
half a cinnamon stick
palm sugar: a scant teaspoon
fresh ginger: a small lump
fine, rice noodles: 200g
greens: about 400g
Thai or Vietnamese basil: a small handful
Make the chicken broth: put the chicken pieces and wings in a deep pan with the whole peppercorns, star anise, cinnamon stick and palm sugar. Peel the ginger, cut it into coins and add to the pan. Pour in a litre of water and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat and leave to simmer, at a gentle bubble, for twenty-five minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside.
Cook the noodles according to the instructions on the packet, then drain and set aside. Trim, wash and lightly steam the greens, then refresh under cold running water.
Divide the hot broth between four bowls, add the noodles and greens and finish with the basil.
Enough for 4
JANUARY 9
An old-fashioned ham, a new sauce
We have never been what you might call a ‘close’ family. A mother and father dead by the time I reached my late teens; a brother who emigrated; an uncle distanced by his obsession with religion. The family member I was closest to was a mischievous, twinkly-eyed aunt whose diet consisted solely of Cup-a-Soup, Bailey’s Irish Cream and a regular swig of Benylin. She lived to be a hundred, which puts the healthy-eating lobby firmly in its place.
When I was a child, she would take me to see my grandmother, a tiny, bent woman (I have inherited her shoulders), whose curtains were permanently drawn. My grandmother’s kitchen always had a pot on the stove and condensation running down the windows. The room was dark and smelled of boiling gammon and the smoke from the coal fire in the parlour. Yet despite the suggestion of food on its way, the scene was less than welcoming. No jolly granny with a laden tea table here, just a tired old lady, exhausted from a hard life spent bringing up five children on her own.
The smell of a ham puttering away in my own kitchen still reminds me of her – I suspect it always will – but now comes with a welcome. Thinly cut ham, warm from its cooking liquor, is a dish I too bring out to feed the hordes. Reasonably priced, presented on a large, oval plate with a jug of bright-green sauce, it seems to go a long way. A piece weighing just over a kilo will feed six, with leftovers for a winter salad the following day.
Parsley sauce is the old-school accompaniment to a dish of warm ham, but far from the only one. This week I put a bag of knobbly Jerusalem artichokes to good use, serving them roasted as a side dish to the ham and to add interest to the accompanying parsley sauce. Artichokes and parsley have an affinity with pork and with each other – I like to add bacon and the chopped herb to the roasted tubers, and snippets of crisp smoked streaky often find their way on to the surface of a bowl of parsley-freckled artichoke soup.
Any large lump of ham will do for slow cooking in water (I sometimes use apple juice). A ‘hand’ of pork, which comes from the top of the front legs and is what the French call jambonneau, is a sound cut for those who want to cook theirs on the bone. A piece of rolled and tied leg is easier to carve for a large number. A cut cooked on the bone shouldn’t give any trouble after an hour and a half on the stove. The meat should fall away with just a tug from a fork.
This is an unapologetically old-fashioned dish and the best accompaniments are those of a gentle nature: a quiet, cosseting sauce, some floury steamed potatoes and possibly the inclusion of some mild mustard, either in the sauce or on the edge of the plate. The recipe can be energised a bit in summer, when it will benefit from a bright-green, olive-oil-and herb-based sauce. But on a day as bone chilling as this, it needs an accompaniment as comforting as a goose-down duvet. We passed round a plate of apples and a lump of milky Cotherstone afterwards.
Ham with artichoke and parsley sauce
Some cooks like to soak their ham before cooking – a precaution against a salty ham. Overly salted hams seem to be a thing of the past, so I don’t bother. It is worth doing if you are unsure of your ham. I’m not convinced the sauce needs any cream but, should you wish to soften it further, 3 tablespoons of double cream will be enough. Serve with the roast artichokes below and large chunks of steamed potato.
a piece of boiling ham weighing about 1.5kg
onions: 2
bay leaves: 2
thyme: 4 short sprigs
black peppercorns: 15 or so
parsley stalks: 6–8
For the sauce:
Jerusalem artichokes: 250g
butter: a thin slice, about 20g
the onions from the ham liquor
parsley: a small bunch, about 15g
