Seafood Chowder

I got back from Boston with a craving for MORE CHOWDER. I really should have a go at making a cob loaf to serve this in, but homemade breadmaker sourdough will have to suffice until the weather is cool enough to switch the oven on. This is also not as heart-attack-inducing as a proper Boston seafood chowder and can be eaten as lunch or dinner without pre-charging the defibrillator. If you want to up the ante, double the flour, reduce the stock to the absolute minimum that covers the vegetables, and top up with double the listed amount of the thickest cream you can find, just before serving. I can never make just enough for two so this (with bread) will do for four people.

Ingredients:

• 1 onion or leek
• 100g lardons OR smoked fish
• 1 medium carrot
• 1 stick celery
• 3 potatoes
• a bay leaf
• 1 tbsp flour
• 750ml litre chicken or vegetable stock
• 1 corn cobs, or a tin of sweet corn
• 500g marinara mix (a mix of white fish, salmon, squid, peeled prawns, and mussels)
• 200ml thickened or double cream
• Salt & freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• a bunch of fresh parsley

Method:
Peel or clean and finely chop the onion or leek. Fry in a deep pan in a little butter or olive oil until translucent and soft. If using the lardons, add at the same time as the onions, so they cook and turn golden. (Don't add smoked fish at this stage!) Meanwhile, dice the carrot, celery and potatoes (no need to peel them). Add the vegetables and the bay leaf to the cooked onions, stir in the flour, then pour over the stock; bring up to a simmer and then allow the vegetables to cook to just past al dente -- about 10-12 minutes. If you like your potato to be falling apart, cook a little longer. Slice the corn off the cob (or drain the tin) and add, along with the marinara mix, and the smoked fish if using. Bring back up to temperature and allow to cook through, a matter of minutes for the fish and the corn. (Be particularly careful not to boil any squid in the marinara mix for more than 30 seconds, or it will go tough!) Once the fish is cooked through, stir in the cream and bring back up to temperature, but do not allow the chowder to boil. Serve in a cob or in bowls, scattered over with finely chopped parsley.

Osso Buco

Still winter, and I'm still craving those yummy sticky warming dishes. Here's one I've never made before: osso buco, a Milanese speciality of cross-cut veal shanks. I was inspired by seeing a cheap pack of ox-tail at the butcher's, and figured a cow's tail is probably pretty similar to a calf's leg. I followed this recipe from taste.com and it was pretty yummy and very rich. So much so that we only had fairly small servings -- one large piece of ox-tail per meal was more than enough. So this recipe would serve six people, or maybe four if they've been hill-walking or ice climbing!

Ingredients:
Osso buco

• 1kg veal shanks or ox-tail
• 2 tablespoons plain flour
• 2 medium red onions, coarsely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, crushed
• 3 medium carrots, thickly sliced
• 2 sticks celery, thickly sliced
• 410g can crushed tomatoes
• a glass of dry white wine
• 250ml beef stock (cube/powder is fine)
• 2 teaspoons dried Italian herbs (oregano, thyme, rosemary, mint)
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste

Gremolata

• 1 garlic clove, crushed (optional)
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
• 1 tablespoon finely grated lemon rind

In a deep casserole dish with a lid, toss the veal shanks in flour and fry briefly to caramelise. (Or skip, if you're strapped for time). Chuck everything else in, stir well, and cook, just simmering, for about six hours, or until the meat is falling off the bone and the vegetables have disintegrated into a thick sauce. Check every so often to make sure it's not burning.

Combine the gremolata ingredients and serve on top of the osso buco, on a big pile of fluffy mash or gooey polenta.

Celery and Lentil Soup

And the prize for 'Most Boring Soup in the World' goes to this recipe, to which I turned only in a desperate attempt to use up a 1kg head of celery that my Most Helpful Husband had bought for 'only a dollar'. With copious amounts of blue cheese, chives and bacon topping, it was just about edible. And it's also the sort of thing you might want, if you were, say, suffering norovirus for a few days and needed something incredibly bland to ease you back into that whole eating thing again. On the plus side, I took a very pretty photo.

Less tasty than it looks.

Baked Celery and Salmon

After a Zumba class I was absolutely ravenous. Thankfully my husband had been slaving away over a hot stove, so a mere hour after I arrived home (during which I whinged almost constantly), a warming, nourishing and comfortingly bland (in a good way) dish of Nigel Slater origin appeared. The trick with this is to make sure you get the salt and pepper just right, and don't eat or drink anything with strong flavours at the same time, as all the flavours are milky and gentle. It's like a healthy version of macaroni & cheese. As usual, quantities are for two people.

Ingredients:

• half a head of celery
• half a small onion
• a bay leaf
• 100 ml milk
• 25g butter
• 1 heaped tbsp flour
• a handful of Parmesan or other cheese (experiment!)
• a small bunch of parsley
• a handful of rough breadcrumbs

Snap the celery into ribs and wash the root ends thoroughly. Put them in a wide saucepan (cut in half if yours is not wide enough to take them horizontally) and pour over just enough water to barely cover them. Peel and thinly slice the onion and add, along with the bay leaf. Poach over a low heat, until the celery is tender.

Preheat the oven to 180  C. With a draining spoon, remove the celery, onion and bay leaf to a large, shallow baking dish. Use 100ml of the cooking water from the celery along with the butter, flour and milk to make a white sauce, then add half of the Parmesan, and all of the parsley and stir. (Nigel talks about cooking this for a long time before adding the parsley, but I NEVER have time for that sort of faffing. It's a white sauce! Get over it!)

Pour the sauce over the celery and top with breadcrumbs and the rest of the cheese. Bake for forty minutes or so, until the topping is crisp. Rest for a few minutes before serving. You'd have time at this stage to quickly sear a couple of salmon steaks on each side - yum.

Winter Slaw with Rare Roast Lamb and Red Pepper Quinoa

Butchers here tend to offer a good selection of marinaded and prepared meats which are ready to roast, fry or bbq. We picked up a rolled loin of lamb with a layer of spices and a small amount of spiced stuffing. It was quite delicious - roasted for 50 minutes at 200 C until golden on the outside and still pink on the inside, then rested for 10 minutes before being sliced thinly. I took the opportunity of the umami flavours spicy, smoky meat  to make a light, crunchy slaw, based on the advice in Nigel Slater's Tender. Carbs came in the form of some seasoned quinoa stirred through with roast peppers left over from a previous meal.

Ingredients:

• one small carrot or half a large
• one quarter of a white cabbage
• a stick of celery, or a generous handful of its leaves
• a small handful of flat-leaf parsley or dill
• 4 tbsp natural yoghurt
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• a generous handful of green pumpkin seeds

Peel the carrot but leave the end on, then grate it into long thin shreds. Finely shred the cabbage and thinly slice the celery (or its leaves). Finely chop the herbs. Combine the yoghurt, olive oil and lemon juice together, and season well, then stir through the vegetables. Toast the pumpkin seeds either in an oven at 200C for 5-6 minutes, or by dry-frying them over a medium heat in a non-stick frying pan. Serve the slaw with pumpkin seeds scattered over.

Pork with Waldorf Topping

This is a dish my mum always makes, and I can't remember if it has a 'proper' name. However the topping for the pork is very similar to the ingredients to a Waldorf salad, minus the mayonnaise, so that's what I've named it here. We usually use pork chops, but I really don't know why, as the topping makes it hard to see where the meat, fat and bone are, and they take awhile to cook through. So I think this recipe is best with a long strip of pork loin, and the topping packed tightly around it - a bit like a roast, but with the stuffing on the outside. (Apologies for the poor photograph, I'll try to take a better one next time.)


Ingredients:

• 300g strip of pork loin or fillet
• two slices of bread
• 2 small eating apples
• 3 sticks celery
• 2 generous handfuls of walnut pieces
• salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 190C. Lay the pork out in a baking dish, with a bare smear of vegetable oil underneath it to prevent it sticking. Whiz the bread in a blender to produce breadcrumbs. Dice, or core and finely slice the apples, Finely dice the celery and roughly chop the walnuts, if they are in large pieces. Combine the topping ingredients together, season well, drizzle with olive oil and toss thoroughly. Pack around the pork in the baking dish and roast for 25-35 minutes, until the pork is done to your liking and the topping is crisp.

Cucumber and Celery Salad

A bottom-of-the-fridge side dish affair, helpful as we are existing on storecupboard stocks as we were away and couldn't shop at the weekend. I like this sort of challenge! If you're feeling greedy, or if your feta hasn't mutated into a weird festering orange thing, you can use feta instead of celery.

Ingredients:

• Two stalks of celery
• A quarter of a cucumber
• a handful of mint leaves
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• pinch of salt
• juice of half a lemon
• splash of olive oil

Dice the celery and cucumber into bite-sized pieces, finely chop the mint leaves, and combine in a bowl with the other ingredients. Serve with something hot and spicy by way of contrast.

Pot-roast Pheasant

This is my basic recipe for pot-roasting pheasants; as the hunting season is out at the moment, I used a guinea fowl instead. A crown of duck would also work, or several quail, or of course a small chicken. The method is most useful for small or gamy birds without a thick layer of fat; if roasted, the little birds tend to become dry and tough, while in a pot-roast all the delicious juices are locked in.

I say this is my basic recipe because it is warming and comforting but not especially challenging, either in difficulty or in flavour. I have run excellent experiments with stronger flavours, such as blood orange and anise, or soy and pomegranate molasses, but this recipe is more of a gentle English pot-roast, to be served with a big pile of fluffy mashed potatoes, perhaps adulterated with a little celeriac or parsnip and a dollop of crème fraîche.

Ingredients:

• A brace of (i.e. two) pheasants
• a white onion or leek
• 4 long, fat stems of celery
• a good glass of white wine
• 100g puy or lentilles vertes
• a handful of parsley
• 3 bay leaves

Remove any stray feathers or string from your pheasants and check the giblets have been removed. Heat a scant tbsp of oil in a deep oven-proof casserole and fry the birds on each side over a moderate heat, until the skin turns golden and the meat sears. Remove to a plate. Turn the heat down, roughly chop the onion or leek and add to the pan, with a little more oil if needed. Chop the celery into short lengths and add these to the pan once the onions are soft.

After the vegetables have cooked a little in their own juices, throw in the parsley and bay leaves, then deglaze the pan with the glass of wine. When all the alcohol has evaporated, add in the lentils. Place the pheasants back in the pan, breast-side down, and tip in any escaping juices. Pour over a litre of hot stock or boiling water, or enough to cover the vegetables generously and come up at least halfway on the birds.

Cover with a tight-fitting lid and either simmer on the hob or cook in a 170 C oven for 35 minutes. Uncover, turn over the birds so the breasts are up, and return for 20 further minutes uncovered, or until the legs pull easily away from the birds. Remove the birds and rest a few minutes before jointing into pieces to serve. If you have too much liquid in the pan then it can bubble uncovered on the hob to reduce. Taste and season; it will probably require salt, which cannot be added earlier as it would prevent the lentils from cooking properly. Enjoy the pheasant in deep bowls with mash and the accompanying vegetables and gravy.