Chicken cacciatore

Cacciatore stew is really delicious, not too fattening and easy to make.

This makes enough food for three or four:

• Whole chicken, jointed, or 4 big leg joints, or 8 chicken thighs (brown meat is definitely best, and keep the skin on as it flavours the sauce)
  • Patted dry with kitchen towel and season with salt and pepper
  • Tablespoon of olive oil
  • 3-4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped or crushed
  • Large onion, roughly chopped
  • Rosemary – about 5-6 stalks, leaves only, no need to chop
  • A jar of pitted olives
  • Two cartons of chopped tomatoes
  • Large glass of white wine (chardonnay is better than sauvignon blanc IMHO)

Pre-heat your oven to 160C.

In a large oven-proof casserole (on the hob), heat the olive oil, add the chicken pieces (they should sizzle when they make contact with the bottom of the pan) and brown all over, which should take about 3 minutes on each side.

Remove the browned chicken and put it aside, then turn the heat down a bit, throw in garlic, onions and rosemary and let them soften for about 4-5 minutes.

Once this is done, return the chicken to the pan, along with any juice that may have escaped. Put the heat up to high, pour in the wine, and cook off the alcohol (done when the vapour doesn’t smell like booze any more).

Add the chopped tomatoes and olives, and when the liquid is back up to the boil, put a lid on the casserole and transfer it to the oven for half an hour. After that, have a look inside and if it still a bit wet, put it back on the hob with the lid off  and the heat up to reduce a bit. The tomato sauce should be quite thick – like you’d have for pasta.

As the olives are quite salty, you may not need to add much salt, but taste the sauce as you are cooking in case it needs more.

I usually serve it with couscous because it soaks up the sauce nicely; baked potatoes are also good.

Broke legged mussels with saffron

Hello

Last time I wrote, my mother’s leg was broken. This time, my leg is broken. For my lunch, I really want to have some mussels with saffron cream, but I am unable to stand without crutches, and consequently unable to cook anything.

My hope is that the following instructions will be sufficiently clear for Harwood to follow them and make the dish exactly how I want it. Wish me luck.

Ingredients:

• 1 bag of mussels
• 1 shallot, finely chopped
• 1 clove of garlic, very finely chopped
• 1 glass of white wine
• Unsalted butter
• A pinch of saffron
• A glug of cream
• Salt
• Pepper

First, de-bag the mussels and leave them in a bowl of cold tap water for half an hour or so. Scrub  and de-beard them, chucking out any that do not shut tightly on being so abused.

In a large coverable pan, heat some butter and a splash of olive oil, soften the onions and garlic, then pour in the white wine. Bring the wine to the boil and let the alcohol burn off for a minute before throwing in the mussels. Reduce to a medium heat, cover the pan and let the creatures steam for a couple of minutes, in which time they will open up.

Remove the mussels to a covered bowl, and add a splash of olive oil to the liquor that remains in the pan, along with your saffron. Add salt and pepper, and cover again for a minute to let the saffron infuse the juice. RIght at the end, add a glug of cream and stir.

Serve the mussels in large bowls, with the liquid poured over the top, and a decent hunk of bread.

Flippin delish fish

My best beloved recently went for a week’s holiday to Palestine. He managed to escape unharmed, despite apparently hanging out with some dodgy diplomats and a bunch of kidnapped mujaheddin, and on his return presented me with a tub of za’atar, which is a rather delicious seasoning mix mostly consisting of thyme.

Za’atar is a most excellent thing – a sprinkling of it will render supermarket hummus almost palatable, for example – and its combination of fragrant savoury means that it goes pretty well with most meat, fish or veg.

If you don’t have a Middle Eastern delicatessen on your street corner, try making some yourself. You’ll need a load of finely crushed dried thyme, some cumin, caraway seeds and sumac. A quick google search informs me that sumac is the product of crushing the fruit from plants of the rhus genus, and you can buy it in little packs from Sainsburys (if you live near a posh one, that is). I bet they sell it in Waitrose too, the pretentious gits.

Assuming that you have some za’atar, then, I can recommend the dish below, which I rather ingeniously mad up as I went along. It only took about 20 minutes to cook from start to finish. It is absurdly straightforward, unfussy and delicious.

Ingredients (serves two):

• Two fillets of firm-fleshed, fresh white fish (I used cod, I’m afraid. If it was the last one in the sea, you could sub in something – monkfish would probably be the best thing for this dish)
• Two tablespoons of za’atar
• A couple of cloves of garlic, very finely chopped
• Four ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped (tinned will do at a push)
• A tablespoon of tomato puree
• A teaspoon of harissa
• A pint of fish or vegetable stock
• Salt and pepper

In a casserole large enough for the fish poieces to lie side by side, heat some olive oil (NOT extra virgin) and add the garlic. Season the fish on both sides with a nice coating of za’atar and some salt and peper.

When the garlic is softened (but not brown), add the fish, skin side down if it has skin, and cook for about a minute on each side.

Add the tomato puree, harissa and chopped tomatoes, then pour over the fish stock. Make sre that everything is evenly distributed, then bring to the boil. Turn down the heat allow to simmer uncovered for about 15 minutes, or until the liquid has reduced to a nice strong broth.

We ate ours served like a stew in bowls, with a bit of bread, but you could dish it up with couscous for a more substantial meal.

What this recipe proves is that I would absolutely pulverise the Masterchef invention round. Laaaaaaahvely.

Post granite faff tuna

Well, it’s been a while, I know, but tonight I invented a dish so frigging delicious that I thought it ought to be shared by people more worthy than me and my crook-legged mother.

First, by way of background, my poor mum smashed her leg into four pieces whilst skiing extremely slowly in Italy last week. As a result, I have decamped to Glasgow for a week to look after the daft creature. Apart from trying to stop her from careering around on her crutches like a teenager on meth, the main duty here is feeding her up. Aside from providing the nutrition necessary to heal her busted pin, I’m hoping she’ll get fat enough to stop nagging me about losing weight.

Anyhoo, this morning I was despatched doun Byres Road to buy food – “I fancy tuna or duck breast” – and trooped off into the misery that is the Scottish weather to hunt and gather. I returned with both, plus a bottle of Tanquerey and almost more fruit than I could carry. The plan was to have the tuna plainly seared with a side of hearty green lentils.

However, the larger part of the evening has been disrupted by the fitting of a granite worktop by a man whose haircut is uncannily similar to my ma’s. No time to faff about with lentils when it’s nearly nine o’clock. Tuna and salad it would have to be.

In a panic, I opened the fridge. Within I discovered a jar of preserved lemons and experienced a moment of almost religious inspiration. Reader, this thing I made is absolutely bloody delicious. If you don’t believe me, try it, and if you don’t like it, I’ll pay the cost of your ingredients. Here’s how it goes:

Ingredients (serves 2):

• Two very fresh and quite thick tuna steaks
• A preserved lemon or two*
• A teaspoon of harissa**
• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper
• Watercress, rocket and/or other peppery salad leaves
• A stalk of celery
• A handful of green olives

Make up the salad first. Slice the preserved lemon(s) in half then into very fine slices – you don’t have to take off the peel. Chop the celery quite finely. Toss it all together along with the olives.

In a small bowl (or a big mug), pour a big glug of good extra virgin olive oil, and mix in a teaspoon of harissa, a generous pinch of sat and some pepper.

Put your tuna on a board, and rub both sides with a little bit of the oil mixture. Heat a griddle pan until it is pretty hot - but not quite smoking hot – and press the pieces of tuna onto it. They should sizzle a bit if your pan is the right temperature, but not blind you with a billow of smoke. Cook for about a minute, then turn the tuna over and cook for a further minute. This is enough cooking for the tuna to be sealed on the outside and warm through the middle, but if you like it a bit better done, cook it for 90 seconds on each side, then turn over and do another 45 seconds or so on each side again.

Meantime, add some of the juice from the lemon jar into your dressing – about a third as much lemon juice as you have oil should be the right balance. Pour it over your salad.

Serve it on a plate or something. The fish will have a slightly spicy warmth a hint of North Africa, but the flavour of the fish should still power through, and most of the Moroccan flavour will come through in the salad.

*Preserved lemons are a staple of Moroccan cuisine; they are small round lemons pickled and jarred, and are most recognisably used in the Marrakchi classic olive and lemon tagine, which I think is actually a fairly revolting dish. Before you call me a poncey cow, you can buy a jar of preserved lemons from tesco for about £2.

**Harissa is another North African/Middle Eastern thing. It’s a paste made of chillies and garlic which gives savoury heat to dishes and is a pretty decent substitute for fresh chillies in most cooked dishes. Well worth having in the fridge. I Morocco it is often served in a little dish to dip your bread into at the start of a meal.

I’ll never get bored of pumpkin soup.

Every year I forget how difficult it is to get the flesh out of a pumpkin whilst retaining its structure so you can both eat it and use it scare the shit out of your youngest cousin. This year I lucked out and bought two, becauser they were unbelievably cheap (£5 in Morrisons for a medium and a large one). I have therefore not bothered trying to preserve the structure of the medium one so I can have pumpkin soup as soon as humanly possible.

I love pumpkin soup. Actually, that’s sort of a lie. I love the pumpkin soup that I make. I am pretty sure I will never order it in a restaurant, and the couple of times I have had it made by other people have been somewhat “meh” experiences. What follows is a recipe for the only really delicious pumpkin soup I have ever had.

Ingredients

• One “medium” pumpkin (about the size of a football)
• Onions (four small or two large) roughly chopped
• A stick of celery roughly chopped
• 3 oz butter
• A pint and a half of vegetable stock
• Half a pint of double cream
• Salt
• Pepper
• Cumin
• Nutmeg

First you have to wrest the flesh from the pumpkin. This is bloody difficult and if you can do it without injuring your wrist, let me know how because I suck at it. You need to remove the seeds and stringy bits from the flesh, and the rind. Once you have managed this, chop it roughly into pieces.

Gently heat the butter in a large heavy bottomed pan, and sweat the onions and celery for about five minutes. Add the pumpkin, cumin, grated nutmeg and salt, and cover with a lid. Leave over a medium heat for another five minutes.

Pour over the stock, bring to the boil and then reduce the heat to simmer for at least 40 minutes, until the pumpkin is very soft.

Liquidize using one of those handheld jobbies, then add the cream, pepper and more salt if you need it.

Job done. You can freeze the soup if you like. To reheat it, put it in a pan and heat it gently – you need to be very careful that it doesn’t boil.

Pounds and pounds of plums

My lovely pa came to stay with me on Thursday evening on his way down to Kent to play golf. He rang a couple of days before and asked me f I’d lke any plums from his orchard. The conversation went something like this:

Pa: “We’ve got an awful lot of plums in the orchard up here. Would you like some?”

Soph: “Hell yes. I’ll take as many as you don’t need”

Pa: “Seriously? I mean, we’re drowning in the things”

Soph: “Cool, I’ll make some chutney. Bring as many as you can carry”

Pa: “You may live to regret that. I am pretty strong”

Soph: “I like a challenge. Bring it”

So my father pitched up on Thursday evening bearing at least 5 kilos of victoria plums from his garden. I picked through them on Friday morning, assuming that a good 30% would be manky or full of worms. Alas, I think I have only thrown away maybe 15 of the little bastards.

They are delicious though. I often find victoria plums rather tart, but these are actually very sweet. Thankfully, Miles Jupp, who was a guest on Test Match Sofa on Friday, is a big plum fan, so he munched his way through, and even took a bag of them home with him (it was a big bag too). This also allowed me the luxury of the thrilling parting words “Miles, your plums are on the kitchen counter, in a blue bag”, which elicited exactly the peurile giggling I had hoped.

So far I have managed three recipes, offloaded about a kilo on my little sister Matilda, and have only about a kilo left, so I am making very good progress.

The first thing I made is a sort of roast plum compote, which is pretty simple, but has proved lovely with a bit of yoghurt. I stoned and halved about 500g of plums, spread them over the base of an oven-proof dish, sprinkled over enough caster sugar to form a fine layer over the top, and mixed in a couple of handfuls of chopped mint. I also poured in a little water, just to make sure that the fruit didn’t burn.

I roasted the plums for about 45 minutes in the oven at gas mark 5, giving them a little shake about half way through to make sure it was all cooking evenly. When I took them out they had become nice and soft, and some of the skins had become a little caremelised at the top.

The result is not really a compote, but it’s not really the same as stewed fuit either, and I had some warm with a bowl of yoghurt. It is a lovely conforting mush, and the mint gives it a fragrance that lifts the flavour of the fruit to something a bit special.

Eggs Benedict – a beginner’s effort

I awoke late this morning with a hankering for Eggs Benedict. Under normal circumstances I’d go out and buy them in the pub, and probably have a bloody mary to make it a proper Sunday brunch. Incidentally, I sort of loathe the word brunch, it is an unnecessary gilding of the wondrous lily that is a late breakfast.

Anyway, I am flat broke at the moment, so incapable of gilding anything let alone going to the pub, and I knew that I had all the necessary ingredients for the dish in the hosue, so I put my intrepid face on and headed for the kitchen.

I have never before poached an egg. I knew the theory, and I have seen it done by real people before, but I could not bring myself to believe that it really was possible to make the egg all go into one perfect little purse of loveliness without a secret trick or a magic word to complete the seemingly alchemical process.

First though, the hollandaise, a notoriously tricky sauce that is easy to cock up. It is a sort of custard made with butter rather than cream. I did nearly cock it up this morning, but I held my nerve and ended up with a passable effort. So here’s how it happened:

Ingredients:

• 1 egg yolk
• Salt
• Pepper
• 2 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 3 oz butter

First blend the egg yolk and salt and pepper in a medium sized bowl, or even better in the small bit of the Magimix if you have one.

Next heat the vinegar to boiling in a pan. If you want to do it really properly, you can put a very finely chopped shallot in your vinegar and a few pappercorns but I couldn’t be bothered, and it’s amost as good without.

Drain the hot vinegar and let it cool just a little bit, then put your mixer/blender back on in the egg bowl and pour the vinegar in. The trick throughout is that everything should eb just hot enough to start thickening the egg, but not so hot that it either makes the eggs scramble or separates the sauce. It’s all most taxing.

Next, cut the butter into cubes and again heat in the pan or microwave until they are hot and starting to foam (don’t let it go brown). Stick the blender/mixer back on and pour the butter in a bit at a time. The sauce should start thickening (not thinking as I originally typed there) as you add the butter. If it does start thinking, it’s probably a good idea to run away.

If it doesn’t thicken or think, and my bastard sauce didn’t this morning, pour it into a small pan and heat over the lowest possible flame, stirring like a mad person to make sure it doesn’t get ruined, until it does thicken. It should have the consistency of a creme anglaise.

So, the technically tricky bit of the dish is done. Next thing is to get your muffin toasted. That’s easy, you don’t need my help with that, nor presumably with putting a slice of ham on said muffin when it has been toasted and buttered. If you do struggle with this stage, good luck with the hollandaise, because you’ll need it.

So, onto the egg-poaching. Bring a medium sized pan full of water with a few drops of vinegar to the boil. Have your egg ready cracked into a cup or soemthing, and stir the the water until it is whirling around like a vortex.

Drop the egg into this middle of the whirlpool, and the centrifugal force of the turning water will wind it into a single mass in the middle of the water. You can help it along by stirring around the edge of the pan. It’s really quite cool.

The egg should take about two and a half minutes to be cooked but perfecty runny on the inside. Remove egg from pan using a slotted spoon, and put it on top of the ham, then cover with hollandaise. Often in restaurants it is served with a few little bits of chopped chive as a garnish.

Here’s mine: