Za'atar-crusted rack of lamb, with bitter chickpea mash

One of my favourite new cookbooks is Jennifer McLagan's Bitter (Amazon link is to the yet-to-be-released UK edition, but given Jennifer is Australian, the US version which I own is perfectly comprehensible to a UK reader). It's a fantastic mix of academia (both science and anthropology) and recipes showing how to introduce more flavours into your food. I used to think I liked bitter foods and drinks: now I realise how much more I could love them.

Lamb is a very sweet meat, and so it quite naturally demands something contrasting. A tart fruity sauce is traditional, but I fancied trying to match it with some more bitter flavours. A chickpea mash, seasoned with tahini and mixed with rocket leaves, seemed like a good idea; adding another Middle Eastern flavouring like za'atar seemed even better.

I'm not going to pretend that this was in any way a cheap meal, but a small rack of lamb will only set you back about the same amount as a decent steak would. And it's been a tough week at work.


Za'atar-crusted rack of lamb, with bitter chickpea mash


For the lamb:

A small French-trimmed (i.e. no fat) rack of lamb, around the 200g-250g mark
4 tbs za'atar

For the chickpeas:

1 tin chickpeas
1 (or 2) cloves of garlic (depending on taste and how many important work meetings you have tomorrow morning)
The juice of one average lemon - mine made about three tbs juice
2 tbs tahini
50g rocket (the size of the bags M&S sell; if yours is slightly bigger, just add the lot. You'll never use up the leftovers, so you may as well get the vitamins in your system now.)


Pre-heat the oven to 200 celsius.

Rub the lamb with a tiny amount of oil, just enough to moisten it, then roll the rack in the za'atar, patting it down to make a thick coat. Leave to sit for 10 minutes or so.

Tip the chickpeas and their water into a saucepan, cover, and bring to the boil, then simmer for 15 minutes. I tend to find most tins of chickpeas a little undercooked, and therefore requiring this treatment, but brands do vary. Be sensible; if they're falling apart, stop simmering.

Meanwhile, heat a small oven-proof frying pan with a little oil in it, and when the oil is shimmering, carefully lay in the rack of lamb. After a few minutes, a dark brown crust should have formed; when it has, turn the lamb over to crust on its other side, too. When both sides are done, pop the lamb in the oven for five minutes. This assumes you like your lamb pink, and it's what I would recommend; if you like it very well-done (Hi Dad!) then it will need ten minutes in the oven.

Whilst the lamb is in the oven, remove the chickpeas from the heat, crush in the garlic, squeeze in the lemon, and ladle in the tahini. Then use a potato masher to roughly squidge everything together; with the remaining liquid from the chickpeas you should end up with a chunky, but not dry, mash. Stir in the rocket and pop the saucepan lid back on, so that the leaves wilt in the remaining heat.

Remove the lamb from the oven and leave to rest for five minutes. Pour wine, get cutlery out, etc. Now is a good time to check facebook.

Slice the lamb between each rib, so you get a series of lollipops on sticks. Heap the chickpeas onto a plate, top with the lamb, and finish with a little drizzle of olive oil and a scattering more of za'atar. Eat on sofa, watching TV, with a fork for the chickpeas and fingers for the lamb.

Tarragon- and walnut-stuffed mushrooms

I am going to go vegan for Lent. That seems like quite a big undertaking; I've been vegetarian for the last three Lent periods and that was getting too easy, but even so I feel veganism is quite a big step. With that in mind, I've been eyeing up some of my regular meals to see how easily they might be converted into vegan recipes. The answer is not at all: there really is quite a lot of cheese in there.

This is one recipe which I would, normally, have dumped a couple of handfuls of grated parmesan into, perhaps also using butter instead of olive oil. The good news is that it didn't need either of these: it was delicious just as it was.

You want to get hold of quite deep mushrooms, despite the name - you need them to form a cup to hold the stuffing. Although it certainly wouldn't hurt if a little of the stuffing falls out and goes extra-crisp in the oven.

I've called for the garlic to be sliced as I like having little hits of garlic in different bites, rather than a smooth flavour throughout, but for those interested in the intersection between vegan cookery and garlic processing options, this article may be of interest (garlic apparently becomes more pungent when cooked in vegetable fat vs animal fat).


Tarragon- and walnut-stuffed mushrooms

2 large flat mushrooms
1 small onion
2 cloves garlic
10g/four stems' worth/half a supermarket pack of tarragon leaves
50g walnuts
handful breadcrumbs

Heat the oven to 200 degrees centigrade.

Finely chop the onion and gently fry in a generous glug of olive oil, seasoning with salt, until softened and starting to get golden. Slice the garlic, add to the pan, and fry for a further couple of minutes.

Meanwhile, drizzle the mushrooms with a little more oil, pop into a small roasting dish, and pop them in the oven for 15 minutes.

Chop the tarragon and walnuts, then stir into the onions and garlic, together with a large handful of breadcrumbs. What do you mean, you don't have a handful of breadcrumbs? All single people have stale bread issues: whizz it up in a food processor, freeze, and then grab handfuls out when they're needed.

Remove the mushrooms from the oven and stuff them with your herby nutty mixture, pressing it in firmly. Return them to the oven for a further 10 minutes or until nicely crunchy on top. Fine on their own, but you could serve a little green salad alongside if you fancied it.

5:2 Caponata

I love caponata. A rich sweet-sour sauce enveloping fried vegetables, swimming in olive oil: I ate plates and plates of the stuff when I was in Sicily last year. I like to think it's relatively healthy, but I hadn't considered that it might be an uber-low-cal recipe for a 5:2 fast day dinner. However, BBC Good Food magazine had a pepper-based caponata recipe which they'd managed to squeeze in under 300 cals, which made me reconsider.

I know it's not essential, but I like aubergines in my caponata, slippery and soft against the crunchy celery. With onion and tomatoes, that's a lot of low calorie but big and filling vegetables. That means you can afford to use an almost-generous amount of olive oil, a whole tablespoon per person. It's therefore worth using a decent oil. Sainsbury's do a Sicilian oil in their Taste the Difference range, which I'm currently working my way through. That would be suitably authentic, but do feel free to use your favourite oil.

Amounts below are precise because this is a calorie counting recipe: obviously, those without such constraints should feel free to add more of whatever (especially the oil) they want.


5:2 Caponata

100g celery stalks, sliced
1 small red onion (mine weighed 125g), finely diced
1/2 tin tomatoes, i.e., 200g
200g aubergine, cut into large chunks
2 tbs capers
1 tbs sultanas
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tbs olive oil
handful basil leaves


Add half the tablespoon of olive oil to a saucepan and heat, before throwing in the celery and onion. Keep it over a medium-high eat so that the onion browns nicely: you want to develop the sugar flavours. After ten minutes or so, the onion should be soft and sweet.

Tip in the tomatoes, aubergine, capers, sultanas, and oregano, together with a generous splash of water, and bring up to a gentle simmer. Pop the lid on and leave for half an hour, by which time the aubergines should be silky.

Remove from the heat and leave to cool slightly. Stir through the remaining half tablespoon of oil, and the basil leaves.


This comes to 350 calories; skipping the final half tablespoon of oil reduces that to 280.

Red-braised tofu knots

I got into discussion recently with a fellow Oxford foodie, and we ended up on the topic of pop-up restaurants and supperclubs. "What," she asked, "would you cook if you ran a pop-up of some kind?". Oh, Mediterannean, definitely, I replied. I understand Italian and French cuisine in a far deeper way than any other: I'm just not capable of making up, say, a Chinese dish.

This, my friends, is bollocks. For a couple of years now, I've been gradually educating myself about Chinese food (thanks to Fuchsia Dunlop, mainly). I know how to do roll-cuts and horse-ear slices; I know to smack a salad vegetable before tossing it with a dressing; I actually *like* the texture of wood-ear mushrooms, once described as simultaneously slimy and crunchy.

I know the difference between red-braising and red-braising, because this word describes two very different cooking sauces, depending on where in China you are. Sichuan red-braising is fiery, made with a fermented paste of chillis and dried beans. Hunanese red-braising is aromatic and sweeter, made with five-spice, wine, and sugar.

Personally, I'd take the Sichuan version anyday, but with a slightly less chilli-fiend friend coming over for dinner, I decided to take the heretical route and produce a mixture of the two. Best served with rice and a green vegetable of some kind, when it will serve four, or as part of bigger Chinese meal for eight or so.


Red-braised Tofu Knots

2 onions
4 sticks celery
2 tbs Sichuan chilli bean paste
3 tbs hoi sin sauce
1 star anise
1 stick cinnamon
2 tbs light soy sauce
4 tbs shaoxing rice wine
300g dried tofu knots

Finely chop the onions and celery, then saute in a generous amount of flavourless oil (e.g. vegetable or groundnut, not olive), in a large casserole dish, over a low heat for twenty to thirty minutes. They should be soft and faintly translucent and just starting to get golden round the edges.

Turn up the heat a little, chuck in the chilli bean paste, and stir-fry quickly for a few seconds, until the oil in the pan has taken on its red colour. Tip in all the other ingredients, and pour over enough water to easily cover the knots: this will be around 300ml, but will depend largely on the size of your casserole dish.

Bring to a simmer, and then reduce the heat to low, and leave to gently blurp away to itself for a couple of hours. Check occasionally to ensure that there is still enough liquid in the pot to cover the knots: they will absorb the sauce as they cook, so you may need to add more. At the end of that period, remove a tofu knot, to ensure that they are soft through. Check for seasoning, adding more soy if needed.

The dish will very happily sit for an hour, or could even be chilled and re-heated later in the day.

Baked Norma

Bellini's opera, Norma, is about a pagan priestess who kills herself having discovered that her Roman soldier lover has betrayed her. Fun. Luckily, pasta alla Norma contains no pagans or Romans, and was named solely thanks to the coincidence that both Bellini and this pasta dish are from Sicily. I hear roasted pagan can be a little tough and tasteless. 

This recipe takes the best bits of pasta alla Norma, i.e., everything except the pasta, and then bakes it in the oven until it's all melting together, before dunking garlic bread into it. The ricotta salata is borderline essential. Normal ricotta, feta, or a hard cheese like pecorino can be used instead, but you will get a very different flavour and Sicilians would definitely look down their noses at you.

It's worth knowing that M&S do mini garlic baguettes, ideally sized for the singleton kitchen. Of course, they cost the same as one of Tesco's normal-sized ones, but they really are rather good. Particularly so if you are incapable of not eating the whole of a garlic baguette anyway.


Baked Norma

First, make your tomato sauce:

1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp sugar
red wine
250g tomato passata
salt and pepper

Fry the onion and garlic in a generous glug of olive oil, over a medium heat, for 20 minutes or so, until softened. Add the oregano and sugar, and turn the heat up so that the onions start to caramelise around their edges.

Add a very generous glug of red wine, and reduce until it's almost non-existent. Tip in the passata and check the seasoning: it will want plenty of salt and pepper, and may want some more sugar, too. Simmer gently for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, roast the aubergine. Chop a whole aubergine into one-and-a-half inch cubes, pour over a decent (by which I mean indecent) amount of oil, and toss together until the cubes are well-coated. Roast for 30 minutes at 200 degrees celsius.

Tip the aubergine into the tomato sauce and combine. Then grate over 50g or so of ricotta salata, and pop back in the oven to bake for 10 minutes. The cheese should have browned slightly on top; it won't melt so don't worry about that.

Leave to cool for five minutes, unless you want to remove half the skin off the roof of your mouth, and then dunk in some crusty garlic bread.

Mushroom-stuffed croissants

When I was finishing off my undergraduate degree, revising for exams, I got into a routine of actually getting to the library around 8.30 in the morning. In case it needs saying, getting up that early is not normal for me. For the first (and, since then, only) time, I really felt I needed breakfast. Breakfast is normally a luxury for me, to be enjoyed on weekends, days off, holidays. Most days I can't face the prospect of fitting a meal in between waking and leaving the house.

I had two options at the tube stop near my house, both of which could easily be eaten on the journey to the library. Number one was a sausage bagel (toasted sesame, no butter, brown sauce), and number two was a mushroom- and cheese-stuffed croissant from Delice de France. I'm pretty sure these wonders no longer exist, so I've been thinking about reproducing them for a while.

The conjunction of a stash of sourdough croissants in my freezer and the start of chanterelle season pushed me over the edge. I used chanterelles because Ocado offered me a bunch with 40% off the price, but you could very easily do this with normal button/chestnut/whatever you have. My sourdough croissants were pretty huge, so you might find this mixture will fill two more normal versions.


Mushroom-stuffed croissant

1 large, or 2 smaller, croissants
80g mushrooms
Generous slice of butter (around 15g, I guess?)
3 tbs single cream
20g grated parmesan

Heat the oven to 200 degrees celcius.

Trim the mushrooms, and slice thinly if you're using normal ones. Melt the butter in a small saucepan, over a high heat; add the mushrooms and fry vigorously for a couple of minutes, until the juices have been extracted and the mushrooms have wilted.

Glug in the cream, stir briefly, and turn off the heat. Tip in the grated cheese and stir until melted.

Slice your croissant(s) on their thick side, making sure not to cut all the way through - i.e. leaving a hinge. Open the croissant up, and gently pull out some of its soft insides.

Stuff the mushroom mixture into the space left, squish the croissant back together, and wrap in foil. Pop into the oven for 15 minutes to warm through the rest of the croissant, and allow the flavour to infuse the whole.

Unwrap and munch. This may require a knife and fork.

Lamb chops with pickled peppers

There's a fabulous blog called Single Girl Dinner. If you're not already aware of it, and following its fabulous author, Jessica, on Twitter, then you should do. One of my favourite posts discusses one of the upsides of eating along (indulging your own, ocassionally odd, tastes), in the context of a her mother's sole eating habits.

Jessica's mother's favourite single dinner was liver, as was my mother's. Usually stroganoffed. Utterly disgusting. However, I did manage to acquire some tastes from my mother. One of the most noticeable is my love of meat-on-the-bone: all the fatty, crispy, over-done or extra-juicy bits that others sneered at. During my vegetarian phases, I rarely miss the meat itself, but I do miss the fat, and the unctuous gloop of proper meat stock.

This is originally one of my Mum's recipes. I think it did get cooked for the family, but I always think of it as her dinner, not our dinner. The rest of us (I admit that my fat and crispy bits adoration came later) politely  sawed our way round the bones, peeled off the fat, and left them on the side of the plate. Mum ate the fat and nibbled away at the bones. Here's her handwritten recipe:

I've cut the number of ingredients to make it easier, and less wasteful, to produce for one person. The mushrooms and the sundried tomatoes are gone.

I've also replaced the jar of mixed peppers with some of my homemade pickled peppers. The recipe can be found in Diana Henry's Salt, Sugar, Smoke, which I urge you to buy. I did not count myself as a preserving person (I don't really like jam, for one thing) until I had this book, but now there are jars of all sorts lurking in my cupboards. The pickled peppers are incredibly quick and easy to make, last forever, and go well with all sorts of fatty meats or rich cheeses. But if you don't have any, do as Mum did, and use a couple of peppers from a jar together with some balsamic vinegar.

Lamb Chops with Pickled Peppers

2 lamb chops, rib or loin, whichever you prefer. I've used rib, as I think they're more elegant and they also have more fat on them.
2 pickled peppers
1 tin of borlotti beans
2 tbs mint sauce

Trim any extra fat (beyond the amount you want!) off the lamb chops. Score the remaining fat into little diamonds so that it will crisp up well. Drain and rinse the borlotti beans. Drain the pickled peppers and slice into strips.

Heat a small frying pan until very hot, and then place the lamb chops in, fat-side down. Fry for a couple of minutes until the fat is crisping up well and coloured deep golden.

Meanwhile, heat a little olive oil in a small saucepan, and tip in the beans, peppers, and the mint sauce. Pop on a lid and leave over a medium heat to warm through.

Flip the lamb chops onto one side and fry for about 1 minute 30 seconds on each side, until browned. This will give you a medium-rare chop; if you prefer your meat well done then give them an extra 30 seconds to a minute per side, lowering the heat to stop the outside from burning.

Tip the bean mixture onto a plate, and top with the lamb chops. Serve with plenty of kitchen roll for mopping the fat and juice off your fingers/face.