Potato Gratin -- Cheat's Dauphinoise

When it comes to cooking at home, I am not much of a traditionalist and I am a big fan of short cuts and time-savers.
A real, pedigree gratin dauphinois is made in the South East of France with impossibly thin slivers of raw spuds, slathered in milk and cream and baked in the oven for an hour or more with delicious results. In the neighbouring Savoie they make it even better by adding cheese.
At home in East London, I do not possess a mandolin -- or much patience. This means that on the few occasions when I have tried raw potato bakes (such as the gratin dauphinois, or its stock-based cousin, potatoes boulangere), they have come out burnt on the top and al-dente in the middle.
My salvation came in the unlikely source of a Russian magazine, which suggested cooking the potatoes in a mixture of cream and cream first (a method I letter heard is also favoured by Nigella).
Serve with some greens (spinach, salad, etc), either on its own or as an accompaniment to beef (roast, steak or even carpaccio) or gammon.

Serves 2-4, depending on appetites and how much other stuff you serve with it
600g potatoes
1/2 pint milk
200g double cream (or creme fraiche)
garlic, nutmeg, pepper, salt
200g cheese (Gruyere or Beaufort for Savoyard authenticity, but cheddar also works)
Slice the potatoes as thinly as your patience and kitchen implements allow. Preheat oven to 120 degrees.
Mix the milk and the cream in a pan, add chopped garlic and potatoes, season with nutmeg and pepper. Bring to the boil. Add potatoes, turn down heat and simmer for about 10 minutes.
Using a slotted spoon, layer out the potatoes into a gratin dish.
Pour over the milk/cream and top with grated cheese. Cook in the oven for about 20 minutes, until the top is golden with melted cheesy goodness.
Bon appétit.

Cheese, mushroom and bacon tart

Forget sliced bread. The best food invention ever was ready-made pastry.
With its arrival, any random fridge/cupboard ingredients can be turned into PIE with minimum effort. Pies always look impressive (especially if made in my giant pie dish), go down well with guests and can be cooked in the oven -- all winning attributes in my book.
In terms of filling, pretty much anything goes -- this is an approximate breakdown of a pie (or, strictly speaking, a tart) I made this week for a games night, which reminds me of another pie bonus -- it can be eaten with your hands so is a good snack/buffet food.

Serves 4

1 pack shortcrust pastry
1 punnet of mushrooms
2 onions
150g stilton
150g cheddar
4 rashers of bacon
200g Greek yoghurt (you could also use single cream, sour cream or creme fraiche)
2 eggs
salt, pepper, herbs (I used rosemary and sage)

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Butter your pie dish and line it with pastry. Top with baking beans and bake for about 10 minutes.
Chop and fry the onions, bacon and mushrooms until cooked. You could also add garlic, celery, spinach -- anything you like really.
Beat together the eggs with the yoghurt and add the seasoning.
Layer the onions, bacon and mushrooms over the pastry (remove the baking beans first!).
Scatter over the grated cheese. Top with the yoghurt and egg mixture.
Return to the oven for another 20 minutes or so until cooked and browned on top.
Serve with salad or some form of cooked greens.

Squash Soup

My bookshelf is lined with a dozen or more cookbooks, resplendent with artful photos and names of acclaimed chefs. I love to browse through them, but it is a couple of tattered, old volumes that I come to most often when I am actually cooking.
One of them is Simply Different by Sarah Woodward. Given to me by my mother-in-law, it is 17 years old, out of print and contains not a single picture. And yet, I turn to it time and time again for inspiration and very modern-tasting dishes.
I like how the book is arranged by ingredient, offering inspiration when you find, say, a bunch of sorry-looking carrots at the back of your fridge, a squash in your veggie box or a cheerful sole at your fishmonger's.
This is my version of the pumpkin soup recipe -- perfect for a dreary day.

Serves 4 as a lunch or a hearty starter

900g squash (or pumpkin)
1 large onion
3 sticks celery
3 cloves of garlic
1 litre of chicken stock
200g Greek yoghurt
salt, black pepper

Chop the onion, the celery and the garlic. Fry on a moderate heat for about 10 minutes, with a little oil.
Peel the squash, remove any seeds. Cut into cubes and add to the pan. Stir well before adding the stock. Bring to the boil, then simmer for about 30 minutes until the squash is tender.
Blitz with a blender. Stir through the yoghurt and season with plenty of black pepper. Add salt if necessary (but you may not need to, depending on how salty your stock is).
Serve with bread.

(The original omits the yoghurt, adds olive oil and parmesan and serves the soup with slices of toasted garlic ciabatta to line the bowls.)

Macaroni Cheese

For years, I thought pasta was pasta, period.
The choice on the supermarket shelf was a mixture of the aesthetic - are bows cuter than spirals - and the practical - would you rather slurp spaghetti or shovel in neat spoonfuls of macaroni?
Of course, things are rarely as simple as they first appear. Italian tradition dictates that long, thin pasta goes with thin, oily sauces, while chunkier and ridgier varieties go with a thicker accompaniment that clings better to their shape. That would explain why carbonara is usually served with spaghetti or tagliatelle, but the rule then clearly fails for bolognaise.
One day, I should do a pasta tasting to see how much difference the shape actually makes. But that doesn't sound nearly as much fun as, say, a wine tasting, and for now I still mostly just have one type of pasta in the cupboard at a time. So, tonight, when the cold weather and the dark evening had me yearning for comfort food, we had fusilli cheese. And very good it was too.



Serves 2-3 hungry people

400g pasta
4 slices bacon
1 pint milk
50g butter
50g flour
4 garlic cloves
200g cheddar
mustard, pepper, nutmeg, salt to taste

Cook pasta per instructions. Fry the chopped bacon.
Slice the garlic and put in a small pan with the milk. Warm until just short of boiling. (Or use a microwave.) Warm milk is my newly discovered secret to a perfect white sauce.
Melt the butter in a small pan, add the flour and cook for a couple of minutes. Slowly - very slowly - add in the milk, constantly stirring to make the smooth white sauce.
Flavour with mustard, black pepper, nutmeg (and anything else you fancy) to taste. Grate in about half the cheese.
Put the pasta, bacon and sauce in an oven-proof dish. Top with the rest of the grated cheese and put under a hot grill until bubbling.
Serve with a green salad to keep up the pretence of trying to eat healthily.

For the ultimate guide to macaroni cheese variations, check out Felicity Cloake's Guardian column. But for me it's very much an easy, lazy, comforting kind of dish that does not involve the faff of turning on the food processor for breadcrumbs or splashing out on parmesan. Besides, anything that has been under the grill with cheese on top always looks awesome.

Guilt-easing Soup

Once upon a time, there was nothing to stop me from just having waffles, or even bread and cheese for dinner.
Now there are two spectres over my shoulder, guilt-tripping me into the kitchen -- the veggie box and the blog.

The veggie box (or rather bag) comes from Hackney's Growing Communities and, for £6 a week, fills my fridge with a selection of vegetables I feel duty bound to use up. The latest batch included some cavolo nero -- a dark green, almost black, leafy Tuscan cabbage. First popularised by the River Cafe cookbooks, it is now widely grown in the UK and can be used in recipes which call for kale or savoy cabbage.

Once I'd ruled out the waffles and determined to use up the greens, my first thought was just to fry them with some bacon and top with an egg. But, while slightly more interesting than grilling a frozen potato-based snack, this still didn't seem sufficiently adventurous to provide blogging fodder. So I leafed through my recipe folder and discovered another way of combining cabbage and bacon -- in a hearty, low-effort soup.



Cavolo Nero, Bacon and Bean Soup
Serves 2 hungry people as a main course.

3 slices of thick bacon
2 stems celery
2 small onions
3 cloves of garlic
handful of rosemary
750 ml chicken stock
1 tin of white beans (eg cannelloni)
250g cavolo nero (or kale, or savoy cabbage)

Chop the vegetables and the bacon into fairly small chunks.
Fry the bacon until seared. Add the onions, garlic and celery and fry for about 5 minutes until softened.
Add the rosemary, stock and drained beans. Bring to the boil and cook for about 20 minutes.
Add the cavolo nero and cook for another 5 minutes.

This makes a hearty, warming bowl and has the added bonus of being pretty low on calories. You could grate some parmesan on top to serve, as the original recipe suggested, or like me, you could add a dollop of sour cream. You could also add some black pepper but I would skip the salt, as the stock and the bacon make the soup already quite salty.

Warning: the pale green stems that run through the dark leaves of cavolo nero are very tough. You need to cut them out and just cook the leafy bit. Otherwise, like me, you will end up with some tough and bitter mouthfuls in your otherwise delicious soup.

Oven Risotto With(out) Madeira

Have some madeira, m'dear
You really have nothing to fear
I'm not trying to tempt you, that wouldn't be right
You shouldn't drink spirits at this time of night

This recipe must have languished in my file for half a decade, since a trip to the island of Madeira from which we brought a bottle of its eponymous sweet, fortified wine. The wine, I think, disappeared at a party years ago. But the recipe caught my eye again this week, as I am on the lookout for dishes that can be prepared in advanced and finished off in the oven. With a baby, this is the only way to eat dinner at a reasonable hour, as I discovered after an early attempt at entertaining saw me plonking the guests in front of the stove while I dealt with an especially grumpy bedtime.



2 small leeks (approx 250g)
1 large onion
100g mushrooms
350g risotto (arborio) rice
1l chicken stock
300ml madeira (I used white wine)
75g grated cheese (the original calls for parmesan, but we only had cheddar, which to my philistine taste worked fine)
thyme, parsley

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees.
Fry chopped leek and onions in a hot, oiled pan for about 10 minutes, stirring.
Add chopped mushrooms and fry for another couple of minutes.
Add rice and stir to coat well.
Add the stock, wine and thyme. Stir. Bring to the boil.
Place uncovered in the oven for 30 minutes, or until the rice is cooked and the liquid has all been absorbed.
Stir in the grated cheese and fresh parsley before serving.

The result was a delicious and quite convincing risotto. You miss out the therapeutic stirring, but gain time to spend with your guests/partner/sofa/put a baby to bed.
The original recipe calls for Madeira, dried porcini mushrooms, parmesan and tarragon, and claims to serves 6 people.
I adapted it to suit the contents of the fridge and cupboards and the two of us managed to polish off the lot in one evening, though if you add another course (or are less greedy) you could probably stretch it between 4. As long as you stick to the ratio of rice and liquid, you could experiment with all sorts of other ingredients.

PS Apologies for the slightly out of focus photo, I was too hungry to take more than one!

The Seeds of Halloween

I really, passionately hate food waste.
It is an irrational passion, which knows no boundaries of time, effort, or money. I will rush around buying ingredients to turn that random packet of dried beans that has sat in the cupboard for years, or that minuscule piece of meat left from last night's dinner into a full meal.



So, when I carved out this year's Halloween pumpkin, I had to toast the seeds. The process takes the best part of an hour, creates lots of washing up, wastes electricity, oil and salt. You have to be passionate.




First, spend a good 15 minutes picking them out of the mush of stringy orange innards ( which, I gather, are inedible).
Then, boil them in salty water for 10 minutes. Drain.
Spread them out on a baking try, spray with oil and put in the oven for about 20 minutes.
Discover that this is slightly too long, and your pumpkin seeds are now on the burnt side.
Place your handful of slightly burnt seeds into a small bowl, which they only half fill.
Sit down and chew them bitterly as you google to discover that a bag of (presumably unburnt) seeds can be yours in the nearest supermarket for about 60 pence.
Decide that it is probably best not to add up how much electricity you spent on producing your offering.
Display your carved pumpkin proudly in your window and hope that some trick-or-treaters show up, so you can get rid of the rest of the seeds. If I was a trick-or-treater after home-made treats though, I'd be heading elsewhere tonight.

Happy Halloween!

Lamb Chops with Pea, Feta and Mint Salad

We are in the midst of a house move at the moment, surviving with a few essentials while most of our life possessions snooze in brown boxes.
For the husband, the essentials include half a dozen musical instruments in varying degrees of repair.
For my part, I rushed to unpack the cookbooks - including the thick ring binder of recipes torn from magazines, purloined from friends and stumbled upon on the Internet. This overflowing and messy file is my chief source of culinary inspiration -- including for last night's dinner (which serves two):



2 large lamb chops
200g frozen peas
small pack of fresh mint leaves
100g feta
2 pittas (or any bread, stale will work)
Cook the peas and cool (I rinsed with cold water to speed this up).
Add cubed feta and mint leaves.
Generously pepper the lamb steaks and fry to desired level of done-ness. Leave to rest for a few minutes.
In that time, chop the pitta into large croutons and warm in the pan used for the lamb, thus soaking up any juices.
Mix the croutons into the salad and serve with the lamb.

This would make a good dish for a BBQ, but is also good for pepping up a grey autumn day.

The original recipe, of unknown provenance, also called for cucumber and lemon wedges (which were absent from my fridge) and used twice as much feta as peas.

Secret Garden Salad

We've been back in London for a few months now, rediscovering its tastes and smells. Reading other people's blogs has infected me with a desire to resurrect my own, to chart and share the next chapter of my adventures in the British capital.
There will still be plenty of pigging out, but the arrival of a baby means that now more of it takes place in our kitchen than in restaurants. The baby has further reinforced my love of quick meals, the kind that can be rustled up over a glass of wine once she has gone to sleep and before my stomach implodes from hunger. (I do not cope well with hunger, as my husband will testify. I get very hangry.)
Tonight's dinner was just such a meal -- an easy medley inspired by the plum tomatoes from my vegetable box and the harvest in St Mary's Secret Garden.
I was very excited when, among drab council blocks near the shiny new Hoxton Station I stumbled upon this little oasis of edible plants. The garden was founded a quarter of a century ago and is run by volunteers as a haven for local community. There is even a beehive and a pond full of friendly newts. They sell some of the produce on site, and I was given mini shears to cut my own chard -- my first bit of harvesting since childhood visits to pick-your-own strawberry farms.
Chard is another new discovery for me. Its dark green leaves are reminiscent of spinach, but with a stronger flavour, while its stalks -- deep red or white -- are more akin to beetroot. It's in season for another month, and goes well with egg dishes (like frittatas), as well as in salads.



Baked Camembert with Tomato, Onion and Chard Salad
Serves two as a main, four as a starter.

The hot, baked cheese makes it a nice option for golden, autumnal days, when it seems a shame to completely surrender to the impending winter, but it's clear that this year's salad days are numbered.

6 tomatoes
1 small red onion
small bunch of chard
1 camembert
bread

Chop onions and tomatoes quite finely and place in a salad bowl. If you have time, leave them in the fridge for a couple of hours to soak in each other's juices.
Chop the chard, keeping storks and leave separate. Fry the storks for a couple of minutes, then add the leaves and fry for another minute. Leave to cool (and finish cooking) in the pan. Once cool, add to the tomatoes.
About half an hour before dinner, preheat the oven and pop in the camembert. Leave until its soft to touch on top and runny inside. This took about 20 minutes at 180 degrees in my oven.
Before serving, you could add chopped herbs to the salad (I had some coriander lurking in the fridge). Salad leaves, such as rocket, would also go well.
I don't think this salad requires a dressing, but if you don't like your vegetables naked you could add a bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Eat dipping chunks of bread into the runny cheese and interspersing with fork -fulls of the salad.
If you don't add salad leaves or herbs, any leftovers will last in the fridge for a day or two. Probably not ideal for work pack lunches though, given the raw onion....

St Mary's Secret Garden, 50 Pearson Street, London, E2 8EL www.stmaryssecretgarden.org.uk