Curry Easy - Maddhur Jaffrey

4 reasons why this weekend has been horrible:

After congratulating myself for throwing off a cold, I woke up on Saturday morning without a voice - cold back with a vengeance.

My father-in-law (who probably gave me the cold), also has a bad cold, which meant that S couldn't take the kids to the in-laws. Apparently he caught his cold from an out of date cheesecake. Don't ask.

Both of these combined meant I couldn't take advantage of the free pass I'd been given by S to go out and enjoy myself. So my day of treats, including some shopping, tea and cakes in Great Titchfield Street's Scandikitchen and cocktails in Bob Bob Ricard was cancelled.

This meant there was little to take my mind of the fact I'd just sold my beloved car- a pepper white and black Mini Copper, which went by the name of Pig (a prize for anyone who works out why). I desperately wanted to keep it, but it just wasn't practical - we don't need two cars, and Pig simply isn't big enough to cope with 2 car seats and Adam's pushchair, let alone any luggage or shopping we might have.

So was feeling very miserable.

So, I made what I usually make when I want something comforting with least amount of effort: a big pot of spicy, cold-combatting dahl.

I've never actually followed a recipe before. Instead, I make a vague approximation of what my mother-in-law does instinctively - lazily, I usually just select a load of whole spices (clove, cardamon, cumin & coriander seed, cinnamon bark, bay, black pepper), some ground spices (turmeric, cayenne) throw them into some oil, along with some chopped onion, garlic and ginger, then add water, lentils, and either one or other of tomatoes/coconut milk - sometimes both. Sometimes I'll add some diced lamb at the beginning. I'll always cook in a pressure cooker - 10 minutes on high for the meat, before adding the lentils. If I'm just cooking lentils, the whole thing is done in 5 minutes. So you can see - minimal effort and really tasty.

But the point of this blog is to try actual recipes, so I thought I'd better put a dahl recipe to the test for the first time - I have loads of them. I'm not sure how many Indian cookery books I have, but they would fill a long shelf. As I was (am) feeling delicate, I thought a simple one would be best, so I went for one of several options in Maddhur Jaffrey's Curry Easy, Red Lentils with Ginger.

It was the most pared down I could find - onions, garlic, ginger fried in oil with ground coriander, cumin, cayenne and turmeric, then cooked with tomatoes and red lentils, with fresh coriander leaf and some butter stirred in at the end. It was nice, but unfortunately, nowhere near  as good as the one I usually make.

I have lots of dahl recipes to try (another 7 recipes in this book alone), so I'm going to keep a tally but so far, it's Me 1: Cookbooks 0.

Far Eastern Odyssey - Rick Stein

Rick Stein. The only "celebrity" chef I will go out of my way to watch. Not only do I have all his books, I've cooked from them all too, and even bother to get the DVDs. He just ticks all the boxes for me - I don't mind the Clarkson-esque jeans & Ralph Lauren shirt combo, or Floydian exuberance of his red faced, drink fueled cri de coeurs to camera. It's endearing. He has boundless enthusiasm, a sense of humour and a strong ethical bent, hence his campaigning for Food Heroes.

More importantly, he writes as he speaks - extremely well, and his recipes are interesting and always (for me at least) work.

So last night I had a crack at a recipe from Far Eastern Odyssey. I may have remembered this wrong, but when he cooked this recipe on the television show, he did say something along the lines of, "If you only cook one recipe from this series, make it this one." I will check in due course, as I have the DVD coming. Anyway, it's Vit Nau Cam - Duck braised in a spiced orange juice.

I'm not a fan of duck a l'orange, but slightly tart orange works so well with rich duck and some heat, I hoped it might work. And it did - even S, who doesn't like anything very sweet, loved it. Strangely, it tasted more like a Thai curry than a Vietnamese dish. It's definitely something I'll cook again.

Here's my abbreviated version of the recipe - I followed it almost to the letter, just used the breasts and legs of duck (so I could make stock with the rest), used half the amount of orange juice, because I was cooking it in the pressure cooker (for 20 mins instead of 1/1/2 hours simmering) because there isn't any evaporation, and then, as it reduced well when I added the spring onions, I didn't bother with the cornflour. 

Take a 2.5kg duck and joint it into 6 pieces. Put them in a heavy based casserole (I used the pressure cooker) and fry, skin side down, until crisp and golden, then turn over. Remove the duck pieces, then drain off most of the rendered fat. Reduce the heat, then add 50g crushed garlic and 50g thinly sliced ginger. Fry gently for a couple of minutes, then add 1 litre orange juice, 4tbsp fish sauce, 5 star anise, 2 finely chopped lemon grass stalks, 4 red bird's eye chillies and seasonings. Return the duck pieces to the pan, part-cover and leave to simmer for 1 1/2 hours. Take a the white parts of a bunch of spring onions (reserving one), halve lengthwise and add to the duck, and simmer for another half an hour. Shred the remaining spring onion, lengthways, for a garnish. Lift the duck pieces into a warmed serving dish, skim the remaining sauce of fat (if you like), then simmer vigorously until reduced and concentrated. Mix 1/2 tsp cornflour with 1 tsp water, stir into the sauce and simmer for 1 minute more, stirring all the while. Pour over the duck and garnish with the shredded spring onion.

Valentines, Schmalentines

We aren't great believers in Valentines Day in our house, both hating the idea of prescribed romance. Despite this, S inexplicably bought me a huge bunch of flowers yesterday ("in case you're being a girl and saying that you don't care about Valentine's Day when you do really."), so I thought I'd better mark the occasion somehow. Nothing sweet for us though. He loves offal, so I thought I'd be a bit more literal with the heart motif and cook actual hearts*. I have had a couple of lambs' hearts knocking around the freezer for a while (bought on a whim, for £1 the pair, at the local farmers' market) - ideal opportunity to use them up, right?

Let me say right away that I feel a bit let down by my cookery book collection this time round, as there aren't many recipes out there which use heart. I could have made faggots (from Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's Meat Book) or Paprikash (ditto) - but I wanted to preserve the heart shape, which ruled out cutting up or mincing. The other common method is to stuff them, but I couldn't find a stuffing recipe that inspired me. Most were variations on sage and onion stuffing, even the recipe in Nose to Tail Eating, although this one at least was a much richer affair (including a red wine reduction). Rachael McCormack recommended looking in Turkish/Middle Eastern books - nothing. Perhaps I haven't got the right books? I had high hopes of Claudia Roden and Arto der Haroutunian, but no luck.

So in the end I abandoned the books. I used Nose to Tail Eating as it had the best description on how to prepare the hearts:

"trim the hearts of any excess fat nodules at their openings and any obvious sinews, and the flap at the top that looks like the bit that has a string to tighten at the top of a knapsack. Finally, with your finger, scoop out any blood clots at the base of the ventricles."

I gave them a quick wash too. Next for the stuffing. I wanted more meat, so into the Thermomix went an onion, some lamb mince, then seasonings - lemon zest, dried mint, cinnamon, cumin, coriander, lots of sumac, a merest hint of cayenne and, of course, salt and pepper. Everything was whizzed up together, then stuffed into the hearts (I had lots left over, so they got fried up as little patties for Adam's dinner). I browned the hearts in butter and olive oil, then added some lamb stock, a glug of beer (no wine to hand) and threw in some unpeeled garlic cloves, then simmered for a good couple of hours. I should have followed Marguerite Patten's lead** and pressure cooked them, but I was worried about the stuffing falling out. Next time.

I ended up with two hearts, which somehow managed to be tender and retain firmness at the same time, with a sauce which had reduced enough to be almost a glaze, and a stuffing which had just enough zest to it to cut through the richness of the hearts. We ate it simply on toasted sourdough. Very tasty.



*slightly inspired by an old Buffy episode in which Angel-as-Angelus gives Drusilla a fresh human heart to suck on. Yum.

** Marguerite Patten is a big fan of hearts. When I interviewed her last year she recounted a time when she asked her local butcher if people still bought hearts, and his reply was yes - for their dogs. She said that she was happy for the dogs of course, but what a shame that people didn't eat them themselves.

A Risotto for Optimising Sofa Time.

Being full of cold and generally grumpy today I've been in a bit of a rant mode. One of my main sources of irritation was a tweet from Ruch Reichl who never fails to annoy. She epitomises a particular style of food writing which takes itself oh, so seriously. It's very stylised and tries to be spare, but is in fact adjective rich, humourless and intensely precious. Ms Reichl's tweets are almost self-paradic. Here's a sample: 

"So cold. Heavy snow-swollen sky. Butter-toasted oatmeal, rivers of thick cream, brown sugar. Fresh orange juice: such fragrant hope."

And my favourite:

"Chilly morning; summer ebbing away. Last night's peach pie, fragile and fragrant on this bright morning. Each bite a tiny farewell."

I just can't stand it. The other thing I can't stand is the way in which some writers fall into the trap of the easy

cliche. I'm sure the first time I read a passage which talked about the soothing, meditative, zen like effects of stirring risotto, I would have found it original, but now everyone's at it and it's just annoying. I'm sure I enjoy stirring risottos (or anything else for that matter) as much as the next person, but please, can't we find something else to say about it? Why is there always this need to mysticise cooking. Do I think cooking is good for the soul? Yes, I do, but sometimes, the main benefit is simply that I want something good to eat.

So, as I said at the top, coldy and moany and the last thing I want to do is cook anything, but I have three other people in the house to feed and S is already floundering about wondering what to do. So I check the method in Richard Ehrlich's "80 Recipes For Your Pressure Cooker". Do a quick search and grab in fridge and cupboard (this was made with roast chicken leftovers) and make a risotto in less than 10 minutes. No stirring, beyond a bit of sauteeing at the beginning, and beating in of cheese at the end, and it tasted bloody good too.

Risotto, for those days when you are too tired to stand up and need some extra sofa time:

1 onion, finely chopped

250g risotto rice

A splash of vermouth

600ml chicken stock (mine was very garlicky, so no extra garlic, if you like add some chopped garlic with the rice) 
A pinch of saffron, wetted in some of the chicken stock
Some cooked chicken
A cupful of peas
Tarragon if you have it, or any other herb you fancy
A squeeze of lemon juice
As much grated parmesan as you fancy.


Heat a large knob of butter in your pressure cooker and add the onion. Saute until starting to soften, then add the rice and garlic if you are using it. Stir for a minute or two until the rice is well coated with the butter. Add the vermouth, let it sizzle, then add the chicken stock, saffron,  herbs and seasoning. Lock the pressure cooker lid into place, quickly bring up to pressure and cook for 5 minutes. Fast release under water, then add the chicken, peas and parmesan. If there is still too much liquid left, half cover and leave on a very low heat for 2-3 minutes. Beat to combine and for extra smoothness. Check for seasoning and add a squeeze of lemon juice if you like.

The Omelette Book - Narcissa Chamberlain

Whoops. I started this blog just over a month ago, posted about 5 times, and then got so busy the whole thing got abandoned - yet, today I garner a mention in The Times. Better get cracking then, hadn't I?


I do 99% of the cooking in our household, but there's one thing my partner, S, excels at - omelettes. That is, if I manage to persuade him to keep things straightforward and not throw in anything he might find in fridge or kitchen cupboard. His philosophy is, if he likes x ingredient, and he likes eggs, it follows that he will like them together. And he usually does. I, however, am harder to please. I do not generally like my omelettes to contain tinned stuff - no to corned beef and tinned sardines in tomato sauce. Another no to tinned squid in ink, mainly due to aesthetics, although I have acknowledged that this wasn't too far removed from an omelette made with dark gilled mushrooms (I didn't point out that I have in the past removed the gills to stop my omelette going grey. I know this sounds mad, but I am sure I have read of chefs doing such things.)

Narcissa Chamberlain's book from the 1950s makes me feel conservative and unadventurous, as she has no qualms about experimenting with flavours and agrees with S that tinned goods are often expedient. There are over 300 recipes in this book - savoury omelettes, sweet omelettes, cold omelettes, Danish, Chinese, Japanese and  Russian omelettes. There are omelettes which seem designed to use up leftovers (brussel sprouts, mincemeat), those which are luxurious in the extreme (foie gras, truffles, caviar), some which I can't quite imagine the taste of (an Iraqi omelette, flavoured with walnuts, raisins, saffron, turmeric, chives, breadcrumbs).

So, considering the variety, and the fact that Narcissa Chamberlain is OK with tinned goods, I think telling S that he can cook any omelette as long as it is in this book is quite brave of me. Fortunately, after a heavy weekend, including a pork fest on Saturday (fry up for breakfast, roast pork belly for lunch, ham hock cooked for stock and cold cuts) he as well as I needed something green yesterday. So we made this:

Omelette Clamart


Braise a cupful of peas on a bed of shredded lettuce (we used little gems and frozen peas with no apology), with 1 or 2 spring onions, a pinch of thyme (I substituted tarragon), a sprig of parsley, a lump of butter, salt and pepper and a little sugar (presumably to counteract any bitterness of the lettuce?). Add 2 or 3 tablespoons of water (I used white wine) and braise slowly until tender and most of the liquid has evaporated, but the peas are still moist.


Make your omelette. Put 3/4 of the peas in the centre of the omelette before folding. After folding make a shallow slit on the top of the omelette and place the remaining peas in this.

Delicious, but felt the lack of cheese!

The Independent Cook by Jeremy Round

S is a garlic fiend. I just had a little bet with myself - I was sure that if I were to ask him what his favourite food was (yes, food, not even flavour) he'd say garlic, and I was right, he did. Such is my confidence in his garlic obsession that I knew that he'd be very happy with a series of garlic themed presents last Christmas and I made a whole pile of them - confits, sauces, jams - the only thing which didn't particularly work was the garlic pickles as they somehow lost their garlic flavour in the cooking.

I often deliberately hold back on the garlic, because otherwise we would be eating it with everything, but I do look out for recipes in which garlic is the shining star not one of a multitude of flavours. I found one such dish yesterday - the late Jeremy Round (he died tragically young at the age of 32) was a brilliant food writer - erudite and entertaining. The Independent Cook, based on his colums for that paper, was his only book and was one of  few to take seasonality seriously at that time - not just from the point of view of the locavore, but including the best of the imported produce too. This garlic recipe is included in his section on April, when spring garlic is probably at its best. I made do with the winter stuff, but did take the time to devein.  Here's the recipe, rewritten by me for brevity:

Garlic Custard

Skin, trim and devein the cloves from 2 heads of garlic. Steam for 15 mins over rapidly boiling water, then puree. Whisk with 1 egg yolk and 2 whites. Add 1 tsp potato flour and whisk again. Season. Add 4 tbsp creme fraiche or fromage blanc and whisk again.


Grease 4 ramekins with butter. Divide the mixture between the ramekins, cover with foil and steam for 15 mins - 10 mins with the steamer lid fully on, 5 with it half off.  Turn out to serve.

I would like to know why potato flour is specified, but it does work, and as I am not particularly a fan of wheat or corn flour sauces and custards, I'm happy. S loved it, although he prefers the zing of raw or sauteed garlic, to the creaminess of steamed or poached.

Jeremy recommends serving it with roast lamb, but we ate straight out of the ramekins, and took a leaf out of Rowley Leigh's book and made a version of anchovy toasts.

Cakes from around the World by Julie Duff

I had a bit of a culinary disaster on Boxing Day. I was, as usual, trying to use up father-in-law's fruit and decided to make an apple cake. I like the sort which are often called "Swedish" - slices of apple, coated in cinnamon and demerara sugar and suspended in a sponge. Being short of time, I grabbed baking books off the shelves instead of Scandinavian ones, and found Julie Duff's Pennsylvanian Dutch Apple Cake. Being even shorter of time, I threw all the ingredients in a smaller, deeper cake tin and hoped for the best. The cake rose beautifullyand was firm to touch, a skewer came out clean, there was a little shrinkage away from the tin and it smelled delicious - everything you hope for when you take a cake out of the oven. Being shorter still of time, I left it in the tin and put it in a bag while it was still hot - by the time we'd got to my brother's house for lunch, the cake had sunk dramatically and turned out to be totally raw in the middle. I wasn't given the chance to hollow it out and serve it as a ring cake (my usual save) - instead everyone stood around the table, cutting themselves pieces from around the edge until they got to the uncooked stuff. My brother baked the rest again later.

As everyone agreed that the outer ring of the cake was delicious, I thought it was worth making again, so did so today with my latest batch of apples. These weren't too bad - I have no idea where they came from, but the texture is crisp (no pappiness) and there is some concession to flavour. To be on the safe side, I decided to bake it in a brownie tin, thus making it slightly shallower than suggested in the recipe. This was my only deviation - a batter was made with the usual suspects but with oil instead of butter and included vanilla and lemon juice.  The apples were coated in sugar and cinnamon and layered with the batter. I sprinkled a good amount of demerara sugar on top too. And, fortunately, today it cooked through.

ETA: Ugh, oil though. I didn't have vegetable oil when I made it on Boxing Day so used melted butter instead and it had a lovely rich, buttery flavour. Today I stuck to the recipe and used vegetable (sunflower) oil. No comparison. I always use vegetable oil in banana bread and it's fine, but here - never again.