Summer game

So, game (venison, pheasant, grouse, etc etc) is winter food, right? Autumnal at best. To be paired with rich tomatoey-winey sauces, the juices soaked up by plenty of mash and rooty vegetables.

In which case, I have a problem. I'm moving out of my flat in seven weeks (panic!) and have a freezer full of food which will have to be used before then (double panic!). I managed to get away with using up a pheasant by using a cunning combination of the particularly rainy period we had a fortnight ago, plus a slightly lighter recipe: Diana Henry's Georgian tea-and-grapes one from Food from Plenty. That still left me with two pigeons. With the boy away this weekend, and my strong belief that a little bird is the perfect food for one, I figured it was the perfect opportunity to use one up.

This is my summery way of using a rich meat like pigeon. It's warm, and requires some use of a cooker, but not so much that you can't feel comfortable doing it on a warm summer evening.


Pigeon, Fennel and Raspberry Salad

1 pigeon
1/2 bulb fennel
small handful of radishes (maybe 6)
handful of walnuts or hazlenuts
handful of raspberries
handful of salad leaves - watercress is perfect
walnut oil
a light, sweet vinegar - I used white balsamic, but cider or sherry would work too

First, finely slice up your fennel and radishes. Tip into a bowl, then chop up the nuts and add them, plus around half of the raspberries, which you've torn slightly. Drizzle lightly with the oil and vinegar (perhaps a tbs of each), toss, and set aside.

Remove the breasts from the pigeon (notes on this later), then fry for just two or three minutes on each side; they should still feel fairly squishy as you want them to be rare on the inside. Remove from the heat and leave to sit for five minutes.

Once the pigeon breasts have rested, slice them thinly, then toss with the salad together with the leaves. Tip onto a plate, top with the remaining raspberries, and a little drizzle of some more walnut oil.


Removing breasts from pigeons: the easiest thing to do is to buy just the breasts, or to get a butcher to do this for you. I had a whole pigeon, so that wasn't an option, but it really is very simple to remove them yourself. There's a good video here (ignore the feathers!) - start at 1.45. The basic idea is just to make a slice along one side of the breastbone, then gradually hack your way down the ribcage until you get the whole thing off, then repeat on the other side. You'll find the breasts are really quite happy to come away from the bone in one piece; I've found before that after the initial cut, you can do the rest almost entirely with your bare hands.

Pancetta and asparagus risotto

As some of you may have seen me tweet, I visited the Daylesford Farm Shop on Monday. This is probably a good opportunity to correct a small factual mistype: when I said I escaped having only spent £40, that should have read that the boyfriend escaped having only spent £40. Whoops.

As a small apology for making such a catastrophically erratic tweet, I made a risotto for him last night with two of the ingredients I (/he) bought there: a block of pancetta, and some asparagus. I've been meaning to get hold of pancetta in the piece for ages now; I love the idea of cutting my own lardons to just the size I want them. Supermarket packs always cut them far too small. This block did not disappoint, from the gorgeous smell when it came out of its pack, to the melting texture once fried. It's not that expensive, either - about the same as you'd pay for one of those supermarket packs of ready-teeny-cubed pieces.


Pancetta and asparagus risotto

c. 200g off a block of pancetta, sliced into large lardons (or a pack if that's all you can get your hands on)
Large onion, peeled and finely chopped
c. 200g asparagus spears, tough ends broken off, tips sliced off, and main stem chopped into three or so bits, about the length of the top two joints of your thumb
125g risotto rice
Small glass white wine
500 ml chicken stock (see previous rant here)
50g parmesan, grated

In a small saucepan, heat your stock with the tough ends of the asparagus spears until simmering, then keep warm.

In a larger saucepan, fry your pancetta lardons over not too harsh a heat, so that their fat renders down and they begin to crisp up. This should take 5 minutes or just over. You shouldn't need to add more oil, unless you have some exceptionally lean pancetta on your hands (I didn't!).

Once the pancetta is crispy golden, throw in the chopped onion, stir, and fry for a further 5 minutes or so, until the onion is softened and beginning to get slightly golden itself. Tip in the rice, and stir for a couple of minutes. Tip in the glass of wine and simmer furiously until almost entirely gone.

Add the first ladle of stock, and the chopped bits of main asparagus stem (but not the tips yet). Stir. Leave to simmer. Stir again. Add another ladle of stock when it starts getting a bit dry. Repeat.

After about 10 minutes, throw in the asparagus tips, and keep adding stock and stirring. After about 15 minutes, taste the rice - it should be nearly done, with a slight bite but no chalkiness in the middle. If it needs a little longer, give it a little longer, and taste again in a couple of minutes.

Once the rice is how you like it, stir in the parmesan, and perhaps a little black peppper; with the pancetta and parmesan, it shouldn't need salt.

Serve, with more parmesan at the table.

Not for one

It is, frankly, impossible to cook risotto for one person.

I've tried it a couple of times in the last few months, and just produced enough for two people anyway. Rather like Salad Nicoise, there are too many individual components. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing: leftover risotto can be pretty good, even (especially?) when eaten cold from the fridge at 2 a.m..

Although, although... risotto has always been such a labour of love for me, so much something to be shared, that I've found myself slightly reluctant to make it for just myself. I think this lies partly in the time it takes, the forty minutes or so of standing at a hot stove working your arms muscles for all they can give (and that's before we get onto the stock; more on that beneath): you need someone you love waiting at the other end of that. The other aspect is its soft, warm, comforting texture. I've made fresh-tasting risottos before (see here for a lemon/chilli/prawn one...), but what really makes me happy is the kind of risotto that simply smothers you in a giant cuddle.

And now I find myself cooking for one less and less often, and cooking for two more and more, and I want to cook food that says "I love you" more and more. There's just one problem: my favourite risotto contains mushrooms, and the boy in question is allergic to mushrooms.

So, I have to find a new comfort blanket of flavours, and let go of the old habits. For the rest of you lovers, here's the recipe I won't be cooking in the future. In essentials, it's what I remember from standing at my mother's knee since before I can remember, although she'd never have added the truffle oil at the end, and she always used arborio rice. I like vialone nano these days - the shape takes slightly longer to cook, so it's easier to catch at the al dente stage, but carnaroli is good (better than arborio) and more widely available.

I learned my snobbery about homemade stock at my mother's knee, too, although *guilty look* I do sometimes use the shop-bought fresh stuff, which can often be sufficiently glutinous, and you could do the same here if for some reason you've let your freezer run out of homemade. Stock cubes and their many variants simply won't cut it - risotto needs the juice of animal bones (preferably those of a free-range or organic bird that's been running round strengthening them all its life) to be really good.


Chicken and mushroom risotto, for two

1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
A dessertspoon or so of butter, and a drop or two of olive oil
A couple of handfuls of mushrooms, sliced
150 g risotto rice
A glass of white wine, or half a glass of dry sherry if you're not planning on opening a bottle to drink with dinner anyway
A couple of handfuls of leftover chicken
750 ml - 1 l chicken stock
Another dessertspoon of butter
50 g grated parmesan, plus more still in block to grate over at the end
A teaspoon (or maybe more...) truffle oil

Heat the butter and oil in a large saucepan over a medium heat, and, once the butter starts to fizzle a little, add the onion and fry gently for five minutes or so until it goes all translucent, but doesn't colour. Add the garlic, fry for another minute without letting it catch on the bottom of the pan, then tip in the mushrooms. You'll probably need to add a little more butter here, as the mushrooms will absorb quite a bit, and this is a good stage to do an initial seasoning: I would just use a little pinch of salt here (don't forget you'll add parmesan later, which will also add salt), but my mother would have added lots of pepper, and you could too, if that's your thing. Fry for another couple of minutes until the mushrooms wilt a little and start releasing their juices.

At the same time, pop another saucepan on to heat and stick the stock in there. Don't bring it all the way up to a boil, but get it suitably steamy.

Add the rice, and fry for another minute. This is important, and most recipes won't tell you to do it, but you're aiming to get the rice to soak up some of the butter and to also toast a little. Then tip in the wine or sherry and allow to bubble furiously for a minute until you don't get instantly drunk if you accidentally inhale the steam.

Then comes the steady stage of adding a ladleful of stock, stirring, waiting for it to be absorbed and to evaporate slightly, and repeating for fifteen or twenty minutes. The time and quantity of liquid required depends on so many variables (the exact heat of both the risotto and stock pans, the variety, age, etc, of the rice, how often you stir, etc, etc...) that your only option after about ten minutes is to taste, and taste, and taste again, until the rice has reached whatever your preferred level of dente might be.

At this point, turn the heat off and stir in the extra butter and the initial lot of parmesan (this is what you'll sometimes hear called mantecare, or feeding the risotto - I like the latter term because it hints that the risotto is now a living creature in need of food, which is how I see it). Leave to sit for a couple of minutes, then stir in the truffle oil, and check for seasoning again.

Serve in wide bowls with plenty more parmesan to grate over.


PS. Diane Henry's wonderful and inspiring book, Food from Plenty, has a promising recipe for Chicken and Parsley risotto. Wish me luck.

Facing the inevitable

Well, it had to happen eventually. There's only so long a blog about eating for one can survive without a post about that staple of singleton cuisine: the omelette. Delia dedicates most of a chapter to them, but my inspiration on this topic has always been Elizabeth David's classic essay, 'An omelette and a glass of wine'. Her note at the end, that "the enjoyment of food and wine seems to me to lie in having what you want when you want it" is a rule I live by, although one I sometimes struggle to link to the rushed cooking that life all too often seems to push me in to. So, in the recipes below, I've tried to offer a few suggestions for how one can add a bit of luxury to a simple dinner: if in doubt, though, add that glass of wine.

A month or so ago, I mentioned on twitter that I was planning on writing this post, and one of the most valuable pieces of advice I got back (thanks to my wonderful brother-in-sin) was to get the pan really hot. Of course, to do this, you also need a good pan. I recently purchased myself a 20cm non-stick French skillet, and would strongly recommend it as the perfect omelette pan. Mine is by Meyer/Circulon, cost me £20, and has a gloriously thick base which heats up quickly, holds all that heat, and then gets it right into the eggs like nobody's business. So, please, remove that ancient, slight-too-large frying pan with the rather warped base from your cupboard before trying these recipes.

Another habit I had, until recently, was to try and create an omelette by stirring the eggs once they were in the pan, trying to do that pull-up-the-edges-and-let-the-raw-egg-flow-in thing that I'd read about. I never made it work. Elizabeth David saved me once again: she quotes a recipe where the omelette is created by vigorously shaking the pan once the eggs are in. I had read this several times before, but refused to believe it could work; finally, I thought it was worth at least one try. I put my generous amount of butter in the pan; I waited till it was totally frothing; I tipped the eggs in; and I shook like a woman possessed. And, by some miracle, it worked. I got the lightest, creamiest, most evenly cooked omelette I'd ever made. If you've doubted this method before, please, please, give it a try: it might just change your life.

So: that's the eggs sorted. I need a little more for dinner, though, so beneath are a few ideas for what else to add to your omelette.


A mushroom omelette

This is the basic omelette I make when I have 10 minutes within which to both cook and eat dinner. I use around 5 medium sized basic supermarket mushrooms, very finely sliced, and fry them gently in a decent knob of butter and a beyond-decent amount of salt until they have wilted and their juices have mostly evaporated. You then need to remove them from the pan, and heat a fresh quantity of butter to a higher temperature. Once you've added the eggs and given them a good initial shake (i.e. once the omelette is around two-thirds of the way towards your preferred set), tip the mushrooms back in, and continue shaking. Some of the slices will sink down into the eggs, others will stay on the surface.

This is one omelette I like rolled up in a traditional fashion. In order to do this, you need to keep shaking the pan, but shaking it mostly away from you, so the omelette starts creeping up the far side of your pan. Give the underside of the far edge a little nudge back towards you, and keep shaking away, and nudging the underside towards you, until you have a neat little roll. The hardest part is getting this confection onto your plate without breaking it: I have no solution to this problem. Either way, it will at least taste good.


...and two ways to tart it up

The first way to add a little extra to your mushroom omelette is with a tablespoon or so of chopped herbs. I tend towards tarragon, because it has that highly refined aniseed flavour that is so reminiscent of classic French cookery; chives or some of the very small, soft leaves from a branch of sage also work well.

The alternative is to add a few drops of truffle oil to your eggs. The stuff is pricey (the bottle I'm currently on, from Carluccio's, costs £8 for 50ml), but you need such a tiny amount for such a vast amount of flavour and luxury that it's entirely worth keeping a bottle in your cupboard for emergencies. 1/2 tsp for a 2-egg omelette scents it perfectly; just whisk it in to the eggs before cooking them


Shrimp and pea

I had thought that the idea for this originated with Simon Hopkinson, but re-reading him lately I couldn't find any mention of it. Either way, this is a fairly tweaked version. In addition to your eggs, you need a tub of potted shrimp, a large handful of peas (defrosted frozen ones are fine), and perhaps a tablespoon or so of herbs (again, I tend towards tarragon, but parsley would also be good here).

Take the top layer of butter off the top of the shrimps, and heat in the frying pan. Once bubbling, add the eggs as before, and once they start to set, scatter the shrimps, peas, and herbs over the top. Continue to shake and cook until the omelette is set.


Chorizo, potato, and parsley

This is a recipe for those of you who don't think you like eggs enough to eat omelettes. When very little I was allergic to eggs, and although I grew out of it, I still didn't enjoy eating them in any obviously-eggy format until I tried something like this a couple of years ago. I'm now quite happy eating semi-raw, sloppy, unadulterated omelettes, but I still come back to this dish on a regular basis.

Frying the potatoes takes a while, so this isn't such a fast recipe as those above: one for when you have half an hour, not ten minutes. Also: I don't normally recommend a dish where you use 1/3 of the quantity of an ingredient as normally sold in supermarkets, but chorizo will last for a month or so in the fridge, so you'll have plenty of time to use this in other meals.

You'll need:

1 small potato
around 1/3 of a cooking chorizo
2 eggs
large handful of parsley

Chop the potato and chorizo into roughly 1 cm cubes. Fry the chorizo for a few minutes, until it has released its oil and is crisping up nicely, and then remove from the pan. Tip in the potato cubes, and fry gently for 10 minutes or so, until softened, then return the chorizo to the pan. Whisk the eggs up with the herbs, tip into the pan, and start shaking; you may need to stir this one a little to lift the potato and chorizo off the bottom of the pan and give the eggs a chance to get to the heat. The extra volume also means that it will take a little longer to set than the recipes above: maybe 3 or 4 minutes in total.


Glasses of wine with all the above purely optional, but highly recommended, as ever.

A shopping list, and two recipes, for a British summer

As I write this, I'm looking out my window at a blue sky, from which is apparently falling a very heavy rainshower. It seems that, after the last few months of almost interrupted sunshine, we're finally getting a traditional British summer.

When the weather's good, I know what I want to cook. When the weather's bad, I know what I want to cook. But when it's like this, I struggle. I can't decide from one hour to the next what I want to cook, which makes shopping somewhat difficult. Last week, I was going to make a light salad for dinner, but when the barometer started getting low, it transformed itself into a rich gratin.


Here's what you need to buy:

1 head chicory
100g blue cheese - roquefort or gorgonzola would be personal favourites
large handful walnuts
100g French or German garlic salami (veggies - you can skip this)
Loaf of bread - a ciabatta or sourdough is probably best

And I'm also assuming that you already have olive oil, vinegar, mustard, butter, milk, and flour in the kitchen.


Salad

Lightly toast the walnuts in a dry frying pan, then crumble into halves or so. Cut a couple of slices of the bread into top-thumb-joint-sized chunks, toss in a little olive oil, then fry until golden and crispy croutons have formed. Pull the chicory into leaves, tearing each into two or three. Mix a dressing with 1/2 tsp mustard, a large glug of vinegar, and one of olive oil, then toss the chicory in it. Cut the cheese into cubes, and tear up the salami if the slices are particularly large. Combine all the ingredients.


Gratin

Slice the chicory in two lengthways, and fry, cut-side down, in a little olive oil until browned.

Meanwhile, make a white sauce:

Melt 1 heaped tbs butter in a saucepan, and when it starts to froth, stir in 1 heaped tbs flour, and cook for a minute, maybe. Turn the heat down, and stir in 1/2 pint milk, adding it gradually and making sure the sauce is totally smooth and lump-free before adding more milk. Use a whisk if you need to. Turn the heat up slightly again, and bring the sauce to the boil, stirring all the time to stop it catching on the bottom. Once it's boiled, it will have thickened and stabilised, so you can stop stirring and leave it to simmer gently for around 5 minutes. Cut your cheese and salami up, and stir in to the sauce. Taste it - it probably won't need seasoning, but it might.

Place your chicory into a shallow oven dish, and pour over the cheese and salami sauce. Whizz a couple of slices of bread, the walnuts, and a drop of oil in a food processor until breadcrumbed, then scatter over the top. Bake at 200 degrees for 20 minutes or until sizzling and brown on top.

Quick pasta for busy people

Obviously, being single, my life is a whirl of parties and social events, which means I often only have a few minutes to cook dinner before I have to go out again.* Here are three of my favourite fast pasta sauces, none of which require more than one saucepan and the time it takes to cook the pasta:


Tomatoes, Ricotta, Basil

75g pasta (fusilli, penne, etc best here)
60g cherry tomatoes, halved or quartered
3 tbs ricotta cheese
large handful basil, roughly chopped

Cook pasta; drain and stir in the tomatoes, a drizzle of olive oil, and a good pinch or two of salt. Add the ricotta in teaspoonfuls, then the basil, and stir lightly to combine.

NB. I'll never normally add salt to food, but the tomatoes and the ricotta in this recipe both really need it, so do be generous.


Fresh Tart

This is an instant, fresher, version of a classic recipe called Pasta Puttanesca, or Tart's Pasta (for the original, see Delia).

75g pasta (whichever you like)
60g cherry tomatoes, halved or quartered
1 red chilli, de-seeded and de-membraned, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
2 or 3 anchovies, finely chopped
handful black olives, stoned and roughly chopped
tbs capers
parmesan

While the pasta's cooking, do all your chopping. Drain the pasta, then return the empty pan to the heat with a good slug of olive oil, the chilli, garlic, and anchovies, and leave for 30 seconds or so. Tip the pasta back in, adding all the other ingredients except the parmesan, which you want to grate generously over the top once it's in your bowl.


Green bean, parma ham

75g pasta (tagliatelle or other long pasta best here)
80g green beans, tops trimmed off
3 or 4 slices parma ham (or cheaper proscuitto, if you like...)
tbs creme fraiche
parmesan

Start the pasta cooking, and, when it only has 5 minutes left, add the green beans to the water. Tear the parma ham into long strips. Drain the pasta and beans, and combine with the ham and creme fraiche, grating parmesan over once it's in your bowl.


*Actually, this post was inspired/requested by my sister, who is in a relationship and yet still has a hectic social life. Far too much simultaneous cake having and cake eating going on there for my liking.

A night at the opera

Growing up, I fell into the habit of hosting large dinner parties (say, 8-14 people) for a group of friends. Hosted each time by a different person (or, more accurately, by their astonishingly trusting parents), cooking three course meals in an unfamiliar kitchen for big groups of people whilst getting extremely drunk as only 17-year-olds with no fear of hangovers exhilarated me so much I convinced myself I wanted to be a professional chef when I left university.

Of course, I never did, and, now living in a small one-bed flat, I simply don't have the space to cook for such parties. So when I spotted an opportunity to cook a picnic for 9 friends (and one sister), I jumped at it. We were all off to the lovely Grange Park Opera, where we had hired an Indian pavilion, and purchased vast quantities of champagne, so the food had to live up to its surroundings. I decided to cook a selection of mostly middle-eastern-y food, so people could pick and choose the bits they like, and took an afternoon off work to cook. Here's the recipes (and some pictures, with thanks to @simonabond):

Spanakopitta

When I tweeted that I was making this, it was the one that got the strangest looks. I've been cooking it for years, but for those of you who've never heard of it, it's basically a spinach and feta cheese pie. These quantities made enough for a small slice for 10 people, so if you're catering for a slightly smaller group, I'd suggest halving all the amounts except the pastry, which should make three generous or four slightly less generous dinner portions.

1 onion, sliced
400g spinach
1 supermarket-sized bunch spring onions, chopped
2 tsp dried dill, or 2 tbs fresh dill
400g feta, chopped
150g cottage cheese
1/2 tsp grated nutmeg
4 eggs
6 sheets filo pastry
2 tbs butter, melted

In a pan much larger than initially seems necessary, and one to which you have a lid, fry the normal onion (not the spring ones) in a little oil for 5 mins or until softened. Wash your spinach, and then pack into the pan, clamp on the lid, and leave to steam in it's own juices: give it 3 minutes initially, and then shake/stir to move the uncooked leaves to the bottom of the pan, and give it another 3 minutes. Drain off any excess water and leave to cool a little

Meanwhile, in a large mixing bowl, combine the spring onions, dill, cheeses, nutmeg, and eggs. Once the spinach/onion mix has cooled enough that it won't cook the eggs, stir this in and mix well.

Now take a baking dish approx. 20cm diameter, and butter it lightly. Layer four sheets of your filo pastry in the bottom of the dish, brushing with plenty of melted butter between the sheets, and leaving some edges falling out of the dish. Tip in your filling mixture, level out, and lay the two remaining sheets of pastry on top, again, brushing with plenty of butter. Roll
the edges of the bottom and top sheets together to seal the filling in, and then bake at 200 celsius for 30-40 minutes. Leave to cool slightly before slicing.

Tabbouleh

Despite the efforts of (seemingly) every TV chef and food writer out there, most people still think of this as a rather stodgy salad, with the bulghar wheat (or cous cous, as I'm about to irreligiously use here) being the predominant ingredient. It isn't: it is basically a herb salad with a few extra bits in. Same note on quantities as before: halve these to produce a decent side-salad for 4 people. The slightly funny herb weights are because these are multiples of what they are usually sold as in supermarkets.

160g cous cous (I use it because it's what I always have in the house, use bulghar wheat if you want to be proper)
160g parsley
80g mint
4 tomatoes
1/2 cucumber
5 or so spring onions
2 lemons
drizzle of olive oil
2 little gem or cos lettuces

Juice the lemons, and stir into the cous cous. Chop the tomatoes (I make 24 cubes per tomato, which means quartering each fruit, then cutting each quarter into half lengthways and into three widthways, but you could go larger if you liked), and also mix with the cous cous, which will now start soaking up the lemon-y tomatoey juices and going all soft on you. Chop the cucumber by halving lengthways, scraping out the seeds, then cutting each into four long strips legthways, then cutting into little cubes. Finely slice the herbs - don't chop them, as this will bruise them and give you a soggier salad (HT Claudia Roden). Finely slice the spring onions. Combine all, and drizzle with just a little olive oil to make it all glossy and beautiful. Serve with the lettuce leaves as mini edible scoops.

Grilled aubergines with yoghurt dressing

This is a great side dish with any other grilled meat or fish. Always grill, rather than fry, aubergines: you can use much less oil, and the smokiness is an aubergine's best friend.

4 aubergines, sliced into rounds
Still quite a large quantity of olive oil
150g plain yoghurt (greek, for preference)
1 clove garlic, crushed
Pinch salt
A few tbs water
150g pine nuts

Brush each round of aubergine with oil, and place under the hottest grill your cooker can manage until each is very dark brown, turning and repeating for the other side.

Mix the yoghurt with a generous pinch of salt, the crushed garlic, and enough water to loosen it to an easily pourable consistency.

Toast the pine nuts in a dry frying pan until lightly browned all over.

Pour the yoghurt dressing over the aubergines and top with the pine nuts.

A hummus

This is a slightly drier and more chunky hummus than you're probably used to - I quite like the difference, but you can add significantly more oil/lemon juice/water and mix for longer if you like it smoother. This version is also pretty low-fat, for those of you who are into such things. Hummus is one of those recipes that you can very easily tweak to fit your tastes, so do add more tahini, lemon, or garlic, if you particularly like them. Just keep tasting and adding as required.

I cooked my own chickpeas from dried for this, removing all the skins, and I think it was worth it, but you can use a drained and rinsed 400g tin if you're in a rush.

250g dried chickpeas, soaked overnight
4 tbs tahini
3 cloves garlic
Juice of 2 lemons
1 tbs olive oil
50 ml water

Rinse the chickpeas, cover with water, and boil for 45 minutes or according to pack instructions, or until cooked and soft. Drain, place into a large bowl of cold water, and rub gently between your hands to loosen the outer skins, which should then float to the surface of the water, where you can safely remove them. You don't have to remove every single skin, but a little effort here will make a huge difference to the final quality of your hummus.

Place around 2/3 of the chickpeas into a food processor with all the other ingredients, and whizz till fairly smooth. Taste at this stage and add any more flavours, if needed, or more water. Add the remaining chickpeas, and blitz for a couple of seconds until they're incorporated but still a little chunky.

Extras

I served this with pitta breads, which I bought, and some grilled chicken, which I hope you don't need a recipe for.



The finished meal!

Heaven is...

Sitting in an english country garden in the last of the late May sunshine, birds tweeting in the breaks between the songs on the Glee soundtrack, getting gently sozzled on gin at your parents' expense, and this for dinner:

Tagliatelle with Purple Sprouting Broccoli and Chorizo

Ingredients
75g tagliatelle
75g chorizo
75g purple sprouting broccoli (the thinner the better)
1 clove garlic, sliced
sherry
parmesan

Method

Stick your pasta on to boil, and, 5 minutes before it's done, put a frying pan on to heat up with a drop of oil in it. Chop the chorizo into very small cubes and fry for 3-4 minutes until it's released its oils and is getting crispy, then turn the heat down low and add the garlic and the PSB. Add a glug or two of sherry and scrape the pan to get any crispy burnt-on bits into the sauce. Drain the pasta, mix with the chorizo and PSB, then serve with a little parmesan grated over the top.


I made this with the very last of the PSB grown in my Mum's garden, but it would equally work well with the very first - you want the thinnest possible stems so that you can coil them round your fork with the tagliatelle.


You should probably also drink some sherry with this, but I'd mixed my second G&T before I thought of that.

A tarragon pesto, and two things to do with it

So... this is what I did with my leftover tarragon and parsley from the last blog. It won't make herbs last quite as long as freezing them, but this pesto should last at least a week in the fridge. I love making my own pesto - it's one of those stupidly easy things to do that makes food so much better - and this is a lovely new variation on the traditional basil flavour.

Ingredients

leaves from half a bunch of tarragon - around 2 tbs in total
leaves from half a bunch of parsley - ditto (don't use the stalks, they're too tough for pesto!)
2 cloves garlic
handful almonds
juice 1 lemon
6 or so tbs olive oil (use a decent one, you can taste the difference)
salt and pepper to taste

Stick everything in a food processor and blitz until very well combined, adding more olive oil to loosen the texture if needed.


Once you've got this quantity of pesto, here's a couple of ideas for it:


Tarragon Chicken Salad

This makes two or three lunch portions (depending on how hungry you are...). I've used green peppers as the veg here, but you could use cucumber or other left-over green veg such as peas, green beans or asparagus.

3 tbs tarragon pesto
cooled cooked rice - around 100g uncooked
cooked chicken breast, torn into little strips
1 green pepper, cut into little cubes
3 spring onions, finely sliced
3 tbs creme fraiche

Combine all your ingredients and munch!


Tarragon and Tuna Pasta

1 tbs tarragon pesto
small tin tuna, drained
75g fusilli

Cook your pasta according to the pack instructions and your own taste, then combine with the pesto and flaked tuna.


I've made both these, and have a tablespoon or so of pesto left... any other ideas for what to do with it?

First asparagus

Nigel Slater reckons that 'only a prude can ignore the sexual overtones of asparagus officinalis.' Perhaps that explains my even-greater-than-usual desire to get my hands on the first of the British stuff this year. Although, seeing as Slater never seems to have met a piece of food he wouldn't like to fuck, perhaps we shouldn't take the psychoanalysis too far.

Anyway, here it is. Normally I just boil my first asparagus of the year and smother it in melting butter, but I had to eat a proper supper sometime, so this is the recipe I made. If you're using supermarket thin-cut water-pumped bacon, you'll need considerably more than the 6 rashers of thick-cut dry-cured butcher's bacon I used.

Ingredients

200g asparagus
6 rashers smoked streaky bacon
100g (ish) cherry tomatoes

Method

Heat your oven to 200 celsius and get a baking tray out of the cupboard. Snap any woody ends off the asparagus and drizzle with a little oil. Cut each rasher of bacon into two, and roll up, then snuggle them among the asparagus. Place in the oven for 10 minutes.

Take them out after this time and scatter the tomatoes among the spears and bacon. If the tips of the asparagus look like they might be burning, rearrange the bacon to cover them. Return to the over for a further 5 minutes or so.

Munch with plenty of crusty bread to soak up any juices.


No picture, this time because I munched so fast I didn't have time to take any. I burnt my mouth as a result, so I've already been punished for this sin.


PS. Sorry about the Slater quip. I love him and his cooking very much, but the food/fuck alliteration was too good not to say.


2011 edit

I always make this recipe at least once a year, and last night was the night this year. I am one of those people who are simply incapable of following a recipe (yes, even one of my own), and so I had to have a bit of a tinker around the edges. I used thin slices of pancetta instead of traditional English thick-cut streaky bacon, and wrapped the slices around the tops of around half the asparagus (so, around 6 spears and slices out of 12 spears total).

The effect is gorgeous. Somehow, the pancetta traps the steam coming off the tips of asparagus, and they steam in their own juices to a melting softness, giving a lovely contrast with the crispy pancetta and grilled stalks.

Partridge with peas

One of the big problems I have with cooking just for me is that so much meat comes in packages for two. Even shopping at my local butcher doesn't totally solve this; roasting a whole chicken for one person still seems silly (and faintly depressing...), and despite cravings for the sticky bits that lurk under the wings, I can rarely bring myself to do it. The great thing about game birds is that so many of them come in neat little whole-bird packages for one, complete with mini-drumsticks to chew on. They're also much faster to cook - I made this as a quick after-work Monday supper, on the table in 30 minutes.

I used partridge because that's what I had in the fridge, but you could equally do the peas with pigeon, a couple of quail, or most other poultry or game birds.

Ingredients

1 partridge

4-6 spring onions
few sprigs of mint
few sprigs of parsley
80g peas
2 or 3 slices parma ham
half a glass of white wine

Method

First, get your partridge on to roast: heat the oven to 200 celsius, rub the bird with oil and season, then stick it in for 30 minutes or so.

Whilst that's happily cooking away, slice your spring onions (not too finely; they're going to be cooked well so you don't want them to disintegrate totally), chop your herbs (more finely) and tear your parma ham into little strips.

When the partridge has 10 minutes to go, fry the spring onions briefly in a decent glug of oil, then tip in the peas and wine and boil fairly vigorously until reduced by half. Take off the heat and stir in the herbs and parma ham, then stick a lid on it to keep warm whilst you carve the partridge.

By now your partridge should be ready, so take it out of the oven and leave to rest for a couple of minutes before carving it, then dish up with the peas, pouring the winey herby juices over the meat.


PS. Apologies to Josh, who persuaded me to start this blog, but due to his veggie-ness can't eat my first posting. Sorry Josh. More vegetables soon, I promise.


PPS. No photos. I took lots of lovely ones, but it turns out my ex has run off with the memory card reader, so I have no way of getting them to you. As with the vegetables, more soon, I promise.