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.

Burgers.

I never thought of myself as a meat-and-two-veg kind of cook. That stood me in good stead at the start of my period of being veggie; although I like them, I saw no need to make quorn, tofu, etc appear as regular blocs of protein to mask the absence of a steak or lamb chop from my plate. Instead, I smugly cooked one-pots, salads, pastas...

And then I started to run out of recipes. Worse - I ran out of ideas. I bought a new cookbook (Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian Cookbook, for those who were wondering) and found myself furiously flicking through page after page searching for a dish that could comprise a whole meal. Then I started actually reading the blurb above the recipes. Such-and-such a dish should be served with such-and-such rice and so-and-so salsa. Stir-fry A is good served alongside stir-fry B.

It occurred to me that by excluding plates of food that looked like replicas of meat-and-two-veg, I was hugely narrowing down my range of options. Why not serve one veg dish with a side of another veg dish?

This is basically burgers with relish and salad.


Chickpea fritters

Tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1/2 red onion, roughly chunked
1 clove garlic
1 tomato, roughly chunked
1 egg
2 tbs flour
1 tsp ground cumin seeds
1 tsp ground coriander seeds
1 tsp chilli flakes

Insert everything into a food processor and whizz until you've got a rough paste - unlikely to take more than a few seconds. Add a little more flour if the mixture looks very wet, although you're not going to form it into patties, so it doesn't have to be very stiff.

Heat a few tbs of oil in a wide frying pan, and swirl to coat. Dollop in heaped tablespoons of the mixture (you should get about six), and leave (don't try to prod them about or they will stick and collapse) until you can see them browning round the edges. Carefully slide under them with a fish slice, and flip over. Leave until equally brown on the other side.


Tsatsiki

1 clove garlic
1 tbs dried mint
3 tbs 0% fat greek yoghurt
1/4 cucumber

If you've got one of those grater attachments on your food processor, this is really easy. Actually, it's pretty easy anyway. Halve your cucumber lengthways and remove the seeds, then grate - either in 3 seconds on your food processor, or 3 minutes by hand. Tip the gratings onto a sheet of kitchen roll, top with another, and squidge to remove some of the water. Crush the clove of garlic very finely.

Tip all the ingredients into a bowl, stir, and season to taste - it will probably want a decent dose of salt.


Greek Salad

1/2 red onion (the other half from the patties)
1/4 cucumber (the remains of the half that you had to buy in a supermarket to make the Tsatsiki)
2 tomatoes
1 little gem lettuce, or similar
handful olives
1 tsp dried oregano
olive oil & red wine vinegar

Very thinly slice the red onion. Halve the cucumber lengthways, remove the seeds, and slice thinly into little C-shapes. Chop the tomatoes roughly. Tear the little gem up into mouth-sized pieces.

Again, combine everything in a bowl, with about 2 tbs oil and 2 of vinegar.


This makes a good amount for two fairly hungry people. If you're one, then cook all the patties, and freeze the remainder - they can be defrosted and then reheated in the oven a month or two later (when you come home just slightly too tipsy to cook); the salad will last long enough to have it for lunch, perhaps with a toasted pitta bread, the next day, with any leftover tsatsiki stirred in.

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.

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!

Tomorrow, the sun will come out.

There are some recipes that I can only cook when the weather is absolutely right for them. Salad Nicoise is one of them. I cooked this a couple of weeks ago, when the mercury was hitting thirty, but only just got round to blogging it. The weather's not so great right now, but sometimes you need a reminder that one day, the sun will come out again.

I got a letter in the post today confirming me as the sole tenant of my flat. I was going to have a glass of champagne to celebrate, but I appear to have run out (I'm not sure how I let myself get to such a parlous state), so you're getting this recipe to celebrate instead. You lucky things.

Don't even try making only one portion of this, btw. There's too many different ingredients and you'll only end up with a fridge of quarter-of-a-cucumber, half-a-tin-of-anchovies, etc etc. I suggest cooking one tuna steak, eating most of the salad with that, and having the leftovers for lunch the next day.

Veggies could probably make a decent salad by leaving out the tuna and replacing the anchovies with capers.


Katy's Salad Nicoise

5 or so average-sized new potatoes
handful (80g or so) green beans
100g or so cherry tomatoes
1/2 a cucumber
tin anchovies
handful black olives, pitted (you could be poncily authentic and use nicoise, but I prefer kalamata)
handful basil leaves
handful parsley
1 little gem (or similar) lettuce
1/2 red onion

tuna steak (around 100-150g, depending on personal hunger levels)

1 clove garlic
pinch sea salt
1 tsp dijon mustard
1 tbs white wine vinegar
3 tbs olive oil

Put the potatoes on to boil; when they're nearly ready stick the green beans in. Don't undercook them.

Whilst those veg are cooking, halve your cherry tomatoes, halve, de-seed, and slice your cucumber, finely chop your anchovies, roughly chop your herbs, tear up your leaves, and finely slice your red onion. Mix together.

Make the dressing by crushing the garlic and salt, then whisking them together with the mustard, vinegar, and oil. Add a little oil from your anchovies/olives if you like.

Once the veg are cooked, drain and cool slightly under a running tap. Thickly slice the potatoes, then mix the warm veg with the dressing, and then combine with the salad veg.

Put a griddle pan or frying pan on to heat, and brush your tuna steak with a little oil. Grill or fry for a minute or so each side. It will cook much faster than you expect.

Serve the tuna with the salad. And probably a glass of champagne on the side.



PS. Please don't actually serve champagne with this. The salad will slaughter it. A firm rose would be perfect.

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?