A note . . .

I'm going to be in Prague until early next week. Blog posts will, hopefully, continue as usual, but this rather depends on whether the hotel has in-room Internet access. I am keeping my fingers crossed, and hope to be delivering you commentary on beer and dumplings tomorrow evening.

Pasta alla Medici

Now, while I might rail against Nigella Lawson's approach to ham in cola, I am full of gratitude for her inclusion in Feast of a recipe for Pasta alla Medici, using any remaining ham you might have from the chunk you boiled the hell out of the day before. I'd last eaten it decades ago, and had been looking for a recipe ever since.

When I was twelve or so, a pamphlet was deposited on our school desks. It came from a company (pre-Internet, this) which would fix you up with a penfriend in a foreign country, depending on which boxes you ticked. (I don't recall an 'eating' box to tick under the 'hobbies' heading; I think I ticked something typically precocious along the lines of 'classical music' and 'visiting museums'. It is not surprising that girls on the school bus used to save pockets full of breakfast cereal to put in my hair every morning.)

There were also boxes to tick on the age, nationality and gender of your desired penfriend. Being newly possessed of all kinds of exciting hormones, and also possessed of a very overactive imagination, I decided that the thing every twelve-year-old English schoolgirl required for a full and satisfying life was a seventeen-year-old, Italian, male penfriend.

Fortunately, the penfriend company saw me coming, and allotted me a twelve-year-old girl. She was Italian, though, and she liked reading and music too, so we suited one another rather well, and wrote to each other (in English; my Italian remains limited to deciphering menus and asking the way to the museum) for years.

Eventually, Lisa and I had been writing to one another for such a long time that our parents decided we should visit each other. Her family lived in a beautiful flat in Genoa, where I went to school with her for a couple of weeks and discovered marron glace ice cream (my Mum had sent me to Italy saying sagely: 'in Italy you can buy ice cream in every colour of the rainbow', and I must have annoyed the hell out of Lisa's family by obsessing about finding one in each colour).

Lisa's Mum was a doctor, and didn't have much time at home. When she was at home, she was not, in retrospect, a very engaged cook, and the Findus Crispy Pancake was my introduction to an Italian mother's kitchen. Later that week we ate bollito misto (which translates roughly as 'mixed boilings', and was about as appetising as it sounds).

One thing, though, that Lisa's mother cooked and cooked exceptionally well, was a really fabulous pasta dish, with sweet little peas, ham, and a creamy, buttery parmesan sauce. I asked her what it was called (although not for the recipe; my own mother didn't like me cooking at home, since I did what I do now and sprayed the walls with food when cooking), and was delighted when she cooked it again twice before I left.

Pasta alla Medici is a very simple recipe, but is also, for some reason, a very hard one to find in books. I had to wait nearly twenty years before I came across Nigella Lawson's recipe, and I am gushingly, pathetically grateful. She offers this three-person recipe as one which children will enjoy, and her portions are child-sized - make a larger amount if you're feeding adults.

200g pasta
100g frozen petits pois
150ml double cream
150g diced ham
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan

Cook the pasta following the packet instructions, and after five minutes add the peas to the pasta water. When the peas and pasta are cooked, drain them. Warm the rest of the ingredients through in the pan you cooked the pasta in, then add the pasta and peas, toss to coat, and serve.

I added a few gratings of nutmeg to Nigella's recipe. I also stripped some of the white fat off the ham I had cooked the day before and dry-fried it until crisp, adding a tablespoon of maple syrup and a pinch of cinnamon at the end, bubbling the syrup down to a caramel. I used this crisp, sweet crackling to dress the pasta. This is, however, mostly because I am greedy; you'll probably be perfectly happy just eating the pasta on its own.

Ham in Coke

Several years ago, I stumbled on a Usenet post waxing lyrical about the savoury potential of Coca Cola when combined with pork. That same Coca Cola that your teachers spent years warning you about in the very darkest terms; at my school they used a can to dissolve a volunteer's recently shed milk tooth away to nothing, and demonstrated its unholy ability to clean pennies with rotten-incisored glee.

I have a caffeine-addicted husband and a yen to flout the outdated authority of my Home Economics teacher. I have spent several years perfecting a ham in cola recipe, and am more than mildly irritated to find that these days, Nigella Lawson is publishing a version of ham in Coke in every book she writes. No matter. Mine's better. Ham needs something sweet and spicy to counter its savoury saltiness - it happens that cola is the perfect foil. I can't think of another way I'd prefer to cook ham now - this may sound a perverse thing to do to a nice chunk of pork, but trust me; it's fabulous.

You'll need:

1kg smoked gammon
1-2 large bottles cola (more or less depending on the size of your pan)
1 red onion
1 bulb garlic
1 stick cinnamon
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
2 dried chilis
20 cloves (give or take a few)
1 teaspoon ground chipotle chili
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground mustard
4 tablespoons maple syrup

Place the gammon in a close-fitting, thick-bottomed pan (important, this thick bottom; you need to avoid singing the bottom of your ham) with the onion, halved, the bulb of garlic, cut in halves, the cinnamon stick, coriander seeds and whole chilis. Pour over Coke to cover (I'm afraid it has to be the full-fat version; Diet Coke won't caramelise properly) and put on a medium heat until it reaches a simmer. Lower the heat enough to keep a gentle simmer, and put the lid on for 2 1/2 hours.

After your kitchen timer has gone, preheat the oven to 200c and lift the whole ham carefully from the liquid (Hang onto that liquid if you want to make Boston baked beans). Leave the ham to cool enough to handle. With a sharp knife, remove the rind, without removing the fat.

You'll be left with a joint of meat with a glistening covering of fat. Use your sharp knife to score the top in diamonds, and stick a clove in each corner of each diamond. Make a paste from the ground cinnamon, ground chipotles, mustard powder and maple syrup, and brush it all over the ham, concentrating on the fatty surface. The sweet mixture will caramelise onto the crisping fat; this is pretty much 90% bad for you, but, unfortunately, it tastes approximately 100% good. I really should talk a friendly social statistician somewhere into working out just how bad for you things have to be to start tasting good; I'm sure there's an interesting graph in that somewhere.

Put the whole ham in the oven, uncovered, for twenty minutes, remove and check that the fatty surface has formed a crust. (If you prefer more crust, put the ham under a high grill for two minutes.)

If you have made a large ham, you can make several good meals from it. Eat it like this, freshly cooked, with some sautéed potatoes; eat it in Pasta alla Medici; use it to flavour Boston baked beans.

If you're having people round for dinner and feel like cheating, feel free not to mention the cola. And if you enjoyed this as much as I do, you'll probably want to check out the sticky chicken pieces in coke too.

Onuga 'caviar'

Caviar. It's expensive, it's delicious, and we're being encouraged to avoid it to save the Beluga sturgeon from extinction. Being an impoverished fan of the pressed salted stuff, my little heart leapt on reading that Waitrose were stocking Onuga, a 'completely natural . . . caviar substitute', which, according to their advertorial piece, has a 'smoky. . . clean, fresh taste'. The man behind it, Patrick Limpus, is full of the ethical values contained in his little black pots, and says: 'I love caviar, which is why I'm so proud to have come up with a worthy - and delicious - substitute.'

What follows is entirely my own fault. I used to work in magazine publishing, where one of my jobs was to edit adverts posing as real articles like this; I knew what the Waitrose magazine was doing, but I was still intrigued. I remained intrigued even when I looked at the tiny (and relatively expensive at £6) jar and read the words 'reformed herring product'. It'll be lovely little herring eggs, I posited. Dear little herring eggs that the nice man from the magazine has made salty and tasty for me. I love fish roe. I will walk miles for flying fish roe (tobiko) sushi (which is also a pretend fish roe product, not tasting of much on its own; the Japanese flavour and colour it until it's something approaching manna), and I'd sell my soul for proper caviar. I knew I was going to be on my own at home all day on Sunday (Mr Weasel has to hand his thesis in on Wednesday, after several years of hard mathematical slogging, and is hiding in the lab polishing his diagrams), and decided I deserved a lunch of dear little herring eggs on blinis to cheer myself up in my solitude.

It started promisingly enough; the little black dots did look like fish roe, and on opening my precious jar I put one on the end of my finger, and licked. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, expecting the little egg to pop and release its delicious, oily juices . . . nothing. I chewed. Ah. That's what they mean by 'herring product'.

A little further reading revealed the true nature of my little jar of fishy punctuation marks. They're reconstituted herring meat mixed with a seaweed product to make them gel into little balls, which are then salted and coloured with 'vegetable carbon'. They taste like chewy taramasalata.

Onuga's website makes it pretty clear that the emphasis in developing the product was on the mimicing the appearance rather than the flavour (or the incredibly important texture) of true caviar. 'Onuga . . .', they say, '. . . not only looks like the real thing but it tastes delicious too'. Delicious. Not 'like caviar'. They claim it's effortlessly superior in taste and texture to plain old lumpfish roe, which at least pops for you, rather than rolling round and round your mouth like pellets of fishy denture fixative.

The flavour is pleasant, but I feel I'd have been a bit better off with a tub of Waitrose's very good premium taramasalata, or with a pack of smoked salmon. The texture is a disaster.

I've made twelve blinis. After piling all of them with creme fraiche, Onuga and chives, I eat three, and then I do something unheard of in this house - I throw the rest away.

Wild carrot - and violets in November!

This week's Weekend Herb Blogging post (organised by Kalyn from Kalyn's Kitchen) couldn't be conducted from the garden, because most of the garden is either hidden under mulch or looking very, very sorry for itself at the moment. Winter finally arrived in earnest last week; our absurdly long, warm autumn (something to do with African winds, according to the weather forecasters) has gone, those warm winds replaced by something much less friendly from the north. It's freezing, but very beautiful. Time to take a quick picture of the ruined church next door, and go and find some herbs growing wild somewhere.

We live at one end of the Devil's Dyke, an Anglo-Saxon earthwork which stretches for seven miles in a perfectly straight line. It's an internationally important Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI); the chalk grassland along the length of the dyke is untouched and provides an environment for some very rare plants and animals, including the pasque flower, lizard orchid (which smells dreadful when in flower - a lot like unclean stables) and the exceptionally rare chalkhill blue butterfly. It's a great place to walk and find plants, and there are usually very few other people out walking along it, so it's very a peaceful and pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

The very warm autumn has meant that some plants along the dyke have become confused and are flowering now, when they should be flowering in the spring. I found this violet (in a clump with several others, all pushing boldly through the frost) flowering several months early, not having realised it's November. Violets are a lovely plant to cook with; I'm currently on the lookout for some violet essence to flavour fondants with at Christmas (at the moment it looks like I'm going to have to send away to France for it), and the flowers, crystalised, are beautiful as well as delicious. These violets were smelling glorious. The leaves and root as well as the flower carry the soft, powdery scent, and can also be used in cooking; the leaves are slightly tart but scented, and can be used in a salad or made into a tea, and the roots are used medicinally in cough syrups. It's very sad to see them flowering now, knowing the frost will kill them in a couple of days; I look forward to the violets in the garden flowering next year.

Further along the dyke, I found the dead seedhead of a wild carrot. This is the ancestor of the carrot you grow and eat at home; it has a tap root like the modern carrot, but this tap root is white and more spindly than the carrots we use. (You may know this plant by its colloquial name, the Bee's Nest.) Pick the root young if you want to eat it; it quickly becomes too woody to be eaten.

The whole plant, when green and juicy, smells aromatic and carroty, although the root is not as tasty as the cultivated sort, being rather bitter. The whole leafy part of the plant can be used in a tea, and used to be used widely as a medicinal herb, as it is rather diuretic. It can also be added as a cooking herb in stews, giving a fragrant, carroty flavour.

The wild carrot's seeds are also used in cooking and folk medicine; they have a warm and toasty taste and are good on top of breads. The flower heads, when fresh, can be battered and fried like elderflower heads, and are really delicious; I'll write a post on them in the summer.

Next weekend's herb blogging is going to be awkward and will require some thought - I shall be in Prague for the Christmas markets. I hope the hotel has Internet access - watch this space!

Literary cocktails

I am female and approaching 30 at a headlong rush. This means I like cocktails. I am fortunate, then, in living near Cambridge, where the River Bar and Kitchen perches above the river, over a gym whose window gives a splendid view of a hot tub full of svelte ladies which you have to sidle past to get to the bar.

The Kitchen part of the River Bar and Kitchen is not as glorious as the Bar part, so I'll gloss over it; I ate there with some friends a couple of weeks ago and was rather disappointed (dry meats, vinegary preparation, identikit saucing). The cocktails, though, are well worth a visit.

A few months ago, gurgling happily over a Manhattan (equal measures bourbon and vermouth, with a cherry and some orange zest and a dash of bitters), I was told by a friend with something pink and creamy on the end of her nose that I only like pretentious grown-up cocktails. I think this means that I prefer cocktails which aren't sugary and full of things squirted out of a cow, but I will admit to a certain mental frailty - I get a tiny kick (OK, a massive one) out of the Literary Cocktail. Knowing which brand of lime cordial you should use to make a Gimlet like the kind Philip Marlowe enjoyed, and being able to argue with the barman about it. That kind of thing.

The drink at the top of the page is a perfect example of pretension in cocktail form, and it's my very favourite cocktail, the alcoholic drink I would happily forgo all others for; a Vesper Martini. This is the original Martini James Bond creates in Casino Royale (1957, the first Bond book), named for Vesper Lynd, Bond girl and double agent. He instructs the barman:

'In a deep champagne goblet . . . Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.'

Bond knew what he was talking about; this is a beautiful cocktail.

Kina Lillet is a vermouth, and the guy at the River Bar uses only a tiny breath of vermouth; he says tastes have changed since the 50s. (They certainly have; Tom Lehrer sang about 'Hearts full of youth/Hearts full of truth/Six parts gin to one part vermouth' in Bright College Days, and this is a very vermouth-y Martini indeed to my youthful, truthful tongue.)

My next Martini was a Zubrowka (a vodka flavoured with fragrant bison grass, which is added during distillation) one. I have a great love for W Somerset Maugham. In The Razor's Edge, Isabella says:

'It smells of freshly mown hay and spring flowers, of thyme and lavender, and it's soft on the palate and so comfortable, it's like listening to music by moonlight.'

Even though her ultimate aim in rhapsodising about the stuff is to drive another character to a sodden alcoholic grave, I can't help but feel Maugham himself must have been pretty keen on Zubrowka too. (Another Somerset Maugham favourite was avocado ice cream, which is, you may be surprised to learn, absolutely divine - watch this space.)

For some reason I can't fathom, some apple schnapps and other fruity stuff found its way into my Martini when I wasn't standing at the bar to keep a firm hand on the barman (there really shouldn't be anything other than gin or vodka and vermouth - find me the man who invented the chocolate martini and I will show you an man without tastebuds but with an uncanny understanding of what drunk women will pay for), but it was still pretty fabulous. Excuse the lipstick on the rim in the photograph. It is hard to remember to photograph your Martini before drinking it when you've already had a few.

My friends were now on the champagne cocktails. In the back here is a Carol Channing. Those who have seen Thoroughly Modern Millie, a glorious film with Julie Andrews, Mary Tyler Moore, James Fox and a biplane, will remember Carol Channing's dance with the xylophone and her habit of shouting 'Raspberries!' A Carol Channing is made with muddled raspberries, sugar syrup, Chambord and raspberry eau de vie, topped up with champagne.

In front is a proper champagne cocktail - that is to say bitters soaked into a brown sugar lump, with champagne poured on top. A lovely drink, and a very, very old fashioned cocktail; it first pops up in 1862 in Jerry Thomas's How to mix drinks. (Click the link for an online facsimile of the book.) There are only a very few true cocktails in the book (the other recipes are flips, juleps, punches and recipes for flavoured syrups and so forth), and the champagne cocktail is the only one you're likely to recognise in 2005.

Somebody (as the evening wore on I lost track of who was ordering what. Can't think why) ordered a Mojito (muddled mint and sugar, rum, lime and soda water). A Brazilian friend has special mint-muddling pots and sticks, like a conical mortar and pestle, for making these; she brings cachaça, a Brazilian rum, home to England when she visits her family, and uses it to makes the best Mohitos and Caipirinhas (lime, soda, cachaça and sugar) I've tasted.

I should wrap this post up. Mr Weasel is on his way home from the supermarket; he has gone to fetch a bottle of Big Tom's tomato juice, which we will adulterate with some vodka I've been steeping chilis in for a few months. I love weekends. Those wondering about the Philip Marlowe Gimlets, by the way, should read The Long Goodbye, where Marlowe informs us that 'A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice, and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.' He's right; Rose's is the only one made only with real, fresh limes. Try it some time - cut down on the Rose's if you find it too sweet.

Buffalo wings

Another item from the Great American Suitcase Load of Food I brought back last February was a large bottle of Frank's Hot Sauce. Frank's is the traditional sauce used for gorgeous, buttery, spicy Buffalo wings; unfortunately it's hard to find the dish or the sauce readily in the UK, so you'll have to resort to importing sauce and making your own wings.

We're in luck; chicken wings, being bony and a little unprepossessing, are not something the English, who seem to prefer meat that comes in boneless, skinless chunks, buy very often. While they're usually available in the shops, they're not expensive. This is great news for me; there are plenty of excellent Chinese chicken wing recipes (when I was little we'd fight over the wings, which my Dad always assured us were where the very tastiest, most succulent meat was), and I have an artery-clagging love for Buffalo wings with blue cheese dip and celery. I decided to break into my bottle of Frank's, and pay no attention to the calories.

You'll need to joint your chicken wings. It's extremely easy; you just need a sharp knife. This wing is whole - spread it out and look for the two joints. Mr Weasel, taller, stronger and kinder than me, suggested that his extra height would make the jointing easier. Shamefully, I stood back, beaming, and let him do it. I really don't enjoy handling raw chicken very much; I'm usually fine with raw meats, but for some reason I find chicken a bit difficult. There's something about the way it smells raw which makes me enjoy the cooked product less. Poor thing; he does work for his supper. The joints themselves are softer than the bone itself, so your knife should penetrate cleanly and neatly.

Chop through both joints like this, and discard the wing tip. You'll end up with a little drumstick-looking bit, and one with two little bones (much like your forearm, if you, like me, can only remember which bits of meat are where on an animal by comparing the animal with yourself).

Heat deep oil for frying to 190c (375f). I use a wok and a jam thermometer for deep frying; the wok means you use less oil, and having a wide container means you can fry more wings at once. Fry the winglets in batches ( I did six at a time) until they are golden brown.

When one batch of wings is ready (they should be about this colour), put them to drain on some kitchen paper in a very low oven, where they can keep warm until all their friends are ready. I cooked fifteen wings (so thirty chopped up wing bits), which should serve three people.

Meanwhile, you can get to work on the blue cheese dip while your sous chef gets on with cutting celery into strips. I used a recipe given to me by an American friend, which I've further messed about with and added to a bit; I think it's pretty much perfect:

1 cup sour cream
1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese (use the strongest cheese you can find; for me, this time round it was Gorgonzola, but Roquefort's great in this too)
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 grated shallot
1 clove grated garlic
1 handful fresh herbs, chopped finely (I used parsley and chives)
2 teaspoons Chipotle Tabasco sauce (use regular Tabasco if you can't get the lovely smokey Chipotle version)
Salt and pepper to taste.

Easy as pie; just mix the lot up together.

Now warm half a bottle of that Frank's hot sauce, transported across continents wrapped in your knickers like precious jewellery, with half a pat of butter. When the butter is melted, whisk it all together. Pour the lot over the crispy little winglets in a deep bowl, and toss like a divine salad.

Serve with the blue cheese dip and the sticks of celery. You'll make a terrible mess; have lots of napkins on the table.

I really must find out who the hell this Frank fellow with the sauce is, find him and shake his hand.

Canteloupe and winter melon ice cream

Apologies for the lack of a post last night; one of my friends had his UK Citizenship ceremony yesterday, and we were out late celebrating. (When I got home, I was arguably not in a fit state to be allowed anywhere near a keyboard.) This means you get an early morning, pre-work post.

Buying the melons for this ice cream was an interesting experience. I was casting around the supermarket for some fruit to turn into an ice cream, and saw a stack of canteloupes. Next to it was a second stack of canteloupes; these were nearly half the price. Why could this be? I picked up an expensive one. It smelled fragrant and melony, even through the skin. I picked up a cheap one. It smelled like a potato.

I don't like potato ice cream, even potato ice cream that's a pretty melon colour, so I went for the expensive ones.

To make this ice cream you will need:

2 canteloupe melons, seeds and skin removed
1/2 pint milk
2 egg yolks
4 tablespoons honey
1 pack crystalised winter melon (see below)
2 drops vanilla essence

I started by making a custard as a base; the milk was brought to a near-simmer with the vanilla and honey (from a jar of local honey from bees from the next village), and the egg yolks were beaten in until the mixture thickened. I then pureed the melons in the Magimix, then passed them through a sieve into the custard, folded everything together, and added the winter melon, cut into tiny pieces. Refrigerate the mixture, then follow the instructions on your ice cream maker.

Candied winter melon was my favourite Chinese sweets when I was a little girl. On trips to London I would bully my parents into going to Chinatown to visit the supermarkets, so I could take a pack home. It's tooth-achingly sweet, and the melon has a slightly crisp texture, like a water chestnut. If you're near a Chinese supermarket, do try to get your hands on a pack for this recipe; you could also substitute Italian candied melon, but this is so good that it would be a shame if you couldn't try it.

Winter melon grows in the summer, but has a waxy skin which means it will keep for many months, giving it its name. It's used in Chinese cooking as a vegetable (if it's not candied, it's not very sweet; it's really a gourd and not a sweet melon); it has a crisp texture and is a good carrier of flavours. Once candied, it's sublimely good.

I was hoping to garnish the ice cream with winter melon pieces as well, but unfortunately we'd eaten the few I kept to one side by the time the ice cream was ready. (I defy you to be able to leave unaccompanied winter melon in your kitchen for long without accidentally eating it.) It was delicious; Mr Weasel made gurgling noises and said 'it tastes like sweeties'. Most of the ice cream is now in the freezer, so we can keep people happy at Christmas.

Beef and Guinness casserole

My Dad told me a while ago that he doesn't enjoy stews and casseroles which use stout as a base; he finds them, he said, bitter. This is an opinion shared by a lot of people, and it' s such a shame; the only reason the stout casseroles you've eaten in the past have been bitter has to do with length of time in the oven. Cooked at a low temperature for several hours, the beer will magically turn into a rich, sweet and glossy sauce, and there won't be a hint of bitterness. Promise.

The preparation of this dish doesn't take too long, but you'll need to leave it in the oven for at least three hours - if making if for lunch, I usually make it the night before, leave it in the fridge overnight and reheat. Like many casseroles, it improves with keeping.

Stout, for those who are only familiar with good old Guinness, is a generic term for a very dark, heavy beer made with roasted malts and barley. You can use any stout; it doesn't have to be Guinness. Stout has a toasty, dry flavour; buy a couple of cans to drink with the meal.

I used:
2 1/2 lb rump steak, cubed
3 red onions, quartered and split into layers
2 cans Guinness (or other stout)
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
4 cloves garlic, squashed
1 jar of pickled walnuts, halved
2 tablespoons of juice from the walnut jar
2 tablespoons flour
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Pickled walnuts are another curiously English thing; walnuts picked before they are ripe and pickled whole in a sweetened vinegar. They're perfect with sharp English cheeses like cheddar; sweet and tangy, with a lovely nutty aroma. I use Opie's pickled walnuts; they do look like tiny roast mouse brains (that's one in the photo at the top, nestling to the right of the meat and kind of indistinguishable from it), but they're extremely good. Leave them out if you can't find any (English supermarkets carry them all year round with the other pickles), and add the juice of a lemon and a tablespoon of sugar instead.

Preheat the oven to a very low setting (140c/275f).

Brown the meat in olive oil in small batches. (In the picture on the right, it's just been browned. There is only half a glass of Guinness because I have drunk the rest of the can already. Oops.) Use the pan you'll be cooking the casserole in, over a high flame, and remove the browned meat to a dish. You can really go to town with the browning; you want a good deep brown, almost charred finish to give the flavour depth. When the meat is removed from the pan, add some more olive oil, and add the onions to the pan, stirring them until their edges are also a little charred. Return the meat to the dish with its juices, and stir in the flour (which will help to thicken the sauce). Continue stirring for a minute, then add both cans of Guinness, the herbs and garlic, and the pickled walnuts and their juice. Season, bring to a simmer (hard to spot, this; Guinness gets very frothy when you make it hot), and then put the lid on and put the dish in the oven.

Three hours later, you'll have a rich and unctuous casserole. The meat will be incredibly tender, dark brown and full of juices. I served it with some mashed King Edward potatoes, with quarter of a pint of boiling milk beaten into them, some truffle-infused olive oil and a sprinkling of thyme. I'd like to try making this with Young's Chocolate Stout some time; there's a world of chocolate beer out there just crying out to be cooked with.

Twice-baked garlic and herb potatoes

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the pub baked potato, a horrid thing which usually comes with a raw, solid middle, a charred outside, and insufficient cheese, does its genre a great disservice. The baked potato can be fantastic; a thing of creamy beauty.

American readers whill be shocked to learn that I had never come across the twice-baked potato until February this year, when, skiing in Nevada, I had a sudden and terrible craving for carbohydrates. A nice man agreed to sell me a steak with a choice of accompaniments, among which was a twice-baked potato. I had to ask what it was. He looked at me as if I were wearing an even stupider hat than I actually was, and explained that the twice-baked potato is a potato baked as normal, with the fluffy flesh scooped out and mixed with butter and other good things, placed back into the shell, and baked again until piping hot.

When the nights are cold, dark and depressing, some fresh herbs in your dinner will work magic in making you feel summery. I used flat-leaved parsley, tarragon and chives. I wanted the potatoes' flesh to be really fat and creamy, so looked out for some full-fat cream cheese to beat into them. Full of cheeses, butter and all those carbs, this is not a slimming recipe - but then again, if you want to keep the cold out, you'll need a layer of fat under your jeans. For four potatoes you'll need:

4 baking potatoes
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 pack garlic and chive cream cheese
1 pack unflavoured cream cheese
1 clove garlic, crushed into a paste
1 handful each tarragon, chives and parsley, chopped roughly
2 tablespoons butter
8 tablespoons grated cheddar cheese
Salt

Rub the potatoes with the olive oil, and sprinkle with a coarse-grained salt. Bake at 200C (450 F) for an hour and a quarter. When they're done, slice them in half and, holding the potato in an oven glove, scoop out the flesh. You'll be left with a nice little potato-skin container.

Combine the soft potato flesh with the cream cheeses, herbs and garlic in a large mixing bowl, and thrash about it with a fork until everything is combined. You don't want a completely smooth mixture; just make sure all the ingredients are dispersed equally. Don't salt the mixture; there will be enough salt in the cheeses, and you'll also be able to taste the salt on the lovely crispy skins.

Pile the mixture into the potato skins in the dish you baked them in, and sprinkle the cheese over evenly. Put everything back in the oven for another twenty minutes. Eat with or without a ski hat, but do try not to spend so long taking photographs that they go cold.

Weekend herb blogging

Kalyn, from Kalyn' s Kitchen, is hosting a weekly herb blogging event, where bloggers photograph and talk about the herbs and other edible things in their garden. It just happened that I was in the garden early this morning waving my camera around and being looked at suspiciously by the postman and the village's early risers (most of whom were walking dogs. When I find out which of them owns the dog that keeps coming into my back garden, digging up bulbs and pooing in the hole, I shall...photograph it).

The small, flat herb in the centre here is a lemon thyme. I grow several thymes, and this is my favourite; it's very fragrant, and has a verbena edge which goes beautifully in a bouquet garni. I'll be using some in a beef and Guinness casserole later this weekend. The lemon thyme is surrounded by a French lavender, which is flowering steadily, and has been since early summer. (Given the very hard frost last night, I suspect it'll give up now.) I use the flower heads and leaves in a lavender ice-cream which you'll have to wait until next year to try. This is a fairly horrible photo when viewed this size; I was trying to be artistic. Must remember to stick to being mundane.

These are the last of the rowan (mountain ash) berries. They make a very good jelly earlier in the season, when they are still hard, mixed with crab apples, but the house is currently groaning under the weight of dozens of jars of quince jelly, so I left them on the tree this year.

An old wive's tale says that plants near a mountain ash will fail to thrive, and often die. I do have some trouble planting around this tree, especially with plants like annual fuchsias, which aren't all that hardy to start with. This year I've put in some wood anemone bulbs to flower early next year, and the hellebores under the tree do well too, so we'll see how things are doing in the spring.

Finally, the prickly wild English roses (Rosa Acidularis) in the garden, which smell so wonderful when they flower, are covered with bright haws at the moment. Rosehips can be used in an infusion, are used in a Chinese children's sweet, make another excellent jelly, and can be used as a cooked dessert fruit once the white, hairy centres are removed. I deadhead all my roses to keep them flowering late into the summer and on into autumn, but this bush I leave alone to form its haws, which are as beautiful as flowers; red, fat and shiny, they decorate the bush for months. And don't they look good in the frost?

Beer or pudding?

Meantime Chocolate Beer, from the Greenwich brewery, is, they say, specifically aimed at women, who, according to those marketing it, drink alcopops in preference to beer. Nonsense. Some of the best nights (and worst mornings) of my life have been courtesy of the Cambridge Beer Festival, where both Mr Weasel and I have 'worked' (I use the term advisedly) as staff in previous years. One of the things that swung the choosing of our present house for me was its handy location next to a real-ale freehouse with a fantastic restaurant (nothing like having your Fenland ale within staggering distance - those who email me and appear reasonably sane will be told where it is, but I'm not publishing its name here for fear of people breaking into the house to steal my cake). Beer and I have a glorious, long and ultimately pretty intimate relationship. Girlie beers are not for me.

Or are they? A while ago, when Sainsbury's started stocking Meantime Chocolate Beer, I thought I would try an experimental bottle of the stuff. Damn me if they haven't come up with something grown-up, silky and both beery and chocolatey at the same time. I may be a real-ale bore, but this stuff, marketed to death and not out of a pump (it is, however, bottle-conditioned, which means that new beer and yeast is added to the finished beer in the bottle, making it finish its fermentation and develop fizz after the lid has been put on) is just magnificent. There's not a hint of sweetness to it; any chocolate flavour is the smooth, dark, dry taste you get from a very high cocoa-mass chocolate and not overpowering, and it combines beautifully with this extremely malty, quietly hoppy beer to make something quite disturbingly drinkable. A note of vanilla ties the malt and chocolate together. This is definitely not a novelty beer. If you're in Sainsbury's, pick up a bottle; I think you'll like it.

Now, clearly, buying only one bottle of beer would be the action of someone who wasn't thinking awfully hard. I was thinking hard. So I bought another. My second bottle was one of Liefmans' utterly gorgeous Kriek, or cherry beer, which comes wrapped in a pretty twizzle of printed paper.

Perhaps I do like girlie beers.

Liefmans Kriek is considered one of the very best cherry beers. (Kriek, by the way, is pronounced 'Creek', if ever you are in Belgium and struck with a terrible craving.) It's an unexpectedly sour drink which almost makes your mouth pucker; tart and fruity, but rounded and terribly, terribly delicious.

The beer is a deep, wine-red, with a pretty pink head. (No photograph in the glass, I'm afraid; I forgot to take one before I started drinking, and the glass has lipstick and fingerprints on it. Disaster.) It's unfiltered and unsweetened (important, this; lots of cherry beer is sweetened, and it's not anything like as good), and so full of cherries they almost dance in front of your eyes as you sip it. There's a hint of almond, possibly from the cherry stones. It's like a wonderful fruit juice. A wonderful fruit juice that makes you fall down and giggle.

Yeast. This week it's my number one microbe.

Battenburg cake

If you wish to demonstrate effortless cake superiority to your friends, nothing will do the job better than this showboat of a cake. (Fellow pedants may point at the title of this post and tell me off; you're right, it is also spelled 'Battenberg', but 'Battenburg' gets more hits on Google, and a lot of people get to this blog through Google searches. Yes, I'm pimping for hits.)

Battenberg is the spelling which is, in fact, correct; the cake is named for the (originally German) family who made up part of the British royal family, and eventually renamed themselves Mountbatten in World War I to distance themselves from Germany. It's not clear who first came up with it, but they must have been pleased with themselves; it looks impressive and tastes fabulous, if you're one of those sensible people who likes marzipan. If you're not, go and cook last week's cake instead.

Mary Berry's Battenberg (she calls it Battenburg) cake recipe says you need:

100g soft margarine (I use butter)
100g caster sugar
2 extra large eggs
50g ground rice
100g self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
a few drops of almond essence
red food colouring (you can buy pink food colouring now, which is what's in the cake above)
3-4 tablespoons apricot jam (I used strawberry - I like strawberry jam)
225g marzipan

Preheat the oven to 160c/325f/Gas 3.

Mary Berry beats the butter, sugar, eggs, ground rice, flour, baking powder and almond essence for two minutes until smooth, adds the colouring to on half and then cooks the two halves in the same low, wide tin. I've tried this before, and it's almost impossible to get a reasonably neat line at the colour boundary, so I now use two separate loaf tins, which means you have to cook the cake a little longer than the 40 minutes she suggests (try 50 minutes and test with a skewer). One reasonably foolproof way to tell whether your cake is done is Mr Weasel's Aural Method, where you get close to the cake and have a listen. An underdone cake will be making tiny, fizzy, popping noises. A cake which is cooked properly doesn't pop or fizz.

Don't turn the cakes out until they have had some time to cool, or they will be crumbly. (I was a little too eager with the white half, which, as you can see from the picture, is - well - crumbly. It's not the end of the world; you can glue any dreadful errors back on with jam. This cake is more forgiving than it looks.) Trim each of the two cakes into two cuboids, each with the same square cross-section, so that you can put them all together later. (Can you tell I've been working on editing some secondary school maths materials?) Warm your jam (if, like mine, it is a jam with pips, strain it after warming) in a saucepan until it is runny and spreadable, and assemble the cake in the traditional chequerboard pattern.

Roll the marzipan into an oblong big enough to wrap the cake in. Slather some more jam on the now glued-together cake, and roll it all up in the marzipan, smoothing the join. Make criss-cross patterns on the top with a butter knife. It may not be quite as unnaturally regular as Mr Kipling's version, but it's just as unnaturally pink, even more unnaturally delicious, and will make your friends make the kind of unnatural noises they usually reserve for firework displays.

Spanish omelette

No apologies here, but this is not quite a Spanish omelette, or tortilla. It's Span-ish - Spain filtered through my fridge contents.

There's only one trick here. It's all in the onions. You'll need:

3 red onions, sliced finely
1 chorizo ring, sliced into coins
2 pointed peppers, sliced lengthwise into thin strips
1 large potato, cut into 2cm cubes
8 eggs, beaten gently
1 large knob butter
50g grated parmesan
Salt and pepper

Melt the butter, and put the onions in the frying pan with a large pinch of salt over a medium heat. Now go and do something else, and don't look at them again for twenty minutes. Give them a stir. Do something else for another twenty minutes; if your house is like mine, something somewhere is crying out for a duster. Stir again, and add the potato cubes. Surf the web for the next twenty minutes (you'll find some interesting links on the right). Stir again, this time adding the peppers.

Your onions have been sauteeing now for an hour with a little salt, which has driven lots of the liquid out of them. They will have turned soft, brown and caramelised. They will be sweet and buttery. You will have trouble not eating them straight out of the pan; restrain yourself. Better things are on the way.

Continue to saute, stirring now, for five minutes, or until the peppers have become soft. Spread the sliced chorizo evenly over the top of the pepper and onion mixure, and then pour over the beaten eggs, which you've grated some pepper into.

Keep the pan on the heat until only the top is wet. Sprinkle over the parmesan, and then put under a medium grill until the egg has set and the cheese is turning brown. Gorgeous red juices will be leaking from the chorizo. Slice and serve with some salad and crusty bread. This tortilla is also absolutely wonderful served cold as part of a picnic.

Mussels with creme fraiche - moules a la creme

There is something horribly primal about cooking mussels. I think it has to do with the elbow-grease you have to put in cleaning them and slaughtering any barnacles they might be hosting, hauling bits of their still-quivering little mussely bodies off, and the suspicion that the dead ones may not be dead, but merely pretending in the hope you'll throw them back. (Sadly, these fakers are not smart enough to realise they're 50 miles from the sea.)

I had some very good moules marinere in Wimereux, a town in northern France, in September. Each tiny mussel (smaller than the mussels you might buy to cook at home) had a pea crab living inside its gills (you can see a very graphic video of one found in a mussel here), which, although admittedly mildly creepy on first encounter (Gah! There is a tiny thing in my mussel), made the whole mussel experience about twenty times better, adding flavour and, dare I say it, texture. Lovely, leggy, crispy texture.

The mussels you can find at an English fishmonger will almost certainly be farmed, rope-grown mussels. This means that they're not as gritty as wild mussels, but they're also not as flavourful. On the other hand, though, you can really go to town with the flavours you cook them with, so it's not a total dead loss.

Mussels straight out of the plastic fishmongers' net are rather unprepossessing. They're slimy, they have a straw-like, tough 'beard' attached (you're going to have to remove this later, so pay attention), and they offer a home to a myriad of exciting barnacles and other little friends. Some will be open; rap them on the working surface. If they're alive, they'll shut. If they're cracked or dead (or feigning in the hope that you are on a quayside somewhere), they'll sit there, inert, daring you to look them in the eye. Bin them.

Run a sink of cold water, and drown the sad, live mussels. Give them a good scrub with a little brush, take the beards between your fingers, and yank them off. The larger the mussel, the harder you will have to yank. This beard is not, obviously, a beard, mussels having no weak chins to hide from lady mussels, but is a fibrous mass they grow to attach themselves securely to rocks (or in the case of these guys, ropes). When you pull it off, pull towards the shell's hinge; you might tear apart the meat of the mussel pulling towards the open end, and this will kill them, prevent you from dealing them the unique, boiling-in-wine death you're about to offer. The ones in the picture above are cleaned. They look a lot more appetising.

For this recipe, which serves two people, you will need:

2kg mussels, cleaned
1/2 a bottle white wine (I used a chenin blanc)
4 tablespoons creme fraiche
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
2 bay leaves
1 large bunch parsley
1 large bunch chives
5 shallots (or 1 large onion) chopped finely
4 cloves garlic chopped finely
1 large knob butter

Soften the shallots and garlic with the thyme and bay leaves in the melted butter over a medium heat for five minutes. Turn up the heat, then add the wine and creme fraiche. Simmer for five minutes to burn off the alcohol, and, while the wine mixture is bubbling, tip all the cleaned mussels in. Slam the lid on. The mussels, already pretty grumpy that you've removed a useful body part, will expire in the steam, giving their salty juices to the sauce - you don't need to add salt yourself.

(On re-reading this, I realise it sounds positively pornographic. This is half the fun of shellfish.)

Keep the lid on for three minutes, then check the pan. Fish out as many as have opened as you can, and put them in a serving dish (I use large salad bowls - there's a lot of shell in there). Put the lid back on and steam for three more minutes - they should now all be open. (Discard any closed ones; they were probably dead before you cooked them.) Take the mussels out, leaving the sauce in the pan. Stir the chives and parsley into the hot sauce, leave it for a minute to allow any sand or grit to settle (very unlikely, this, with rope-grown mussels) and spoon it over the open shells.

Make sure you've got some good bread to dip in the buttery, juicy sauce, and use your fingers to pull the satiny little mussels from their shells.

I usually end up naming some of my more recognisable mussels. Clint, the very big one with the nigh-unremovable beard, and Fifi, the teeny, beardless one with the barnacle beauty-spot, both died for my supper. It was a worthwhile sacrifice.

Babi chin - Braised pork with soy beans

Tonight, I feel like something Malaysian. Wandering around Tesco, I realise it's my lucky day; one of my favourite cuts of meat in Chinese and Malaysian terms is pork belly, which is full of flavour (and full of fat - but where do you think that flavour comes from?), and which becomes sticky and rich when braised for a long time. (It also makes a wonderful, crackling roast, which I hope to explore in a later post.) Pork belly is not a remotely popular thing in the UK, and, absurdly, this very tasty cut is only £1.50 for 160 grams. I look around at the grim women pushing joyless trolleys full of chicken nuggets and frozen pizzas, and think unrepeatably uppity thoughts. There is nothing like a Friday evening spent simmering things that smell nice, and feeling smug.

This dish uses cinnamon, which you may think of as a dessert spice. Try it with the meat in this recipe; you'll add it at the beginning, in a paste with the onions and garlic, where it becomes beautifully aromatic. You'll also need some black bean and garlic sauce, which is available in Chinese supermarkets, and a good five-spice powder.

Proper five-spice powder contains Szechuan peppercorns (not really a pepper, but a dried berry), star anise, cloves, fennel and more cinnamon. A good source in Cambridge is Daily Bread, a wholefood warehouse where they grind their own spices. They sell spices in containers of different sizes; little plastic bags, jam jars and enormous great sacks. (It's a pretty inexpensive way to buy spices; if you're in the area, give them a try. They are Christians of a slightly maniacal bent, but hey; the spices are good.)

Babi chin is another dark and rich recipe, and good for warming you from within. You'll need the following:

1 medium onion
5 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon dark soya sauce
1 glass Shaoxing rice wine
3 tablespoons (half a jar) garlic black bean sauce (see photo)
2 teaspoons five spice powder
1 lb pork belly (with skin), sliced into bite-sized cubes
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, sliced into coins
6 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked
5 spring onions, whole
Water (to cover)
1 tablespoon groundnut oil

Chop the onion and garlic as fine as possible in a blender with the cinnamon. Heat the oil and fry the onion, garlic and cinnamon mixture until golden. Add the black bean sauce, the soya sauce, the five spice powder and sugar, and stir fry for two more minutes.

Add the pork and ginger, with a glass of rice wine and enough water to barely cover it with the sauce ingredients. Stir well to mix and increase the heat under the wok to high. Boil the sauce briskly until it is thick and reduced (about fifteen minutes). Add more water (about a pint) and bring to a simmer.

Add the soaked mushrooms and the spring onions. Lower the heat under the wok, cover it and simmer, stirring occasionally until the pork is meltingly tender (aim to be able to cut it without a knife). If you feel the sauce is too thick, add a little more water. Serve with rice.

This is beautiful, glossy, and syrupy. If I were in Malaysia, I'd have put some sugar cane in there with the pork. Sadly, I'm in Cambridgeshire. Sugar cane is not really considered a commodity over here. I need a holiday somewhere where interesting things grow.

Mushroom risotto

It's cold. It's windy. When these conditions prevail, our bodies are programmed to do something rather special. They are programmed to crave stodge.

One organism, the mushroom, does better than we do in the cold, leafy months. The supermarket shelves are overflowing with punnets upon punnets of mushrooms, and they're quite reasonably priced. On top of this, almost everybody I know seems to have a cold at the moment, and I think some garlic, said to have a mild antibiotic effect, is in order. Stodge, mushrooms and garlic. This is a perfect excuse for some mushroom risotto.

Carnaroli is my favourite risotto rice. It's a fat, short grain which will absorb more than its own weight in stock, and cooks to a fluffy, swollen, creamy risotto. If you can find carnaroli rice, do try using it instead of arborio, which is more often sold as a risotto rice in supermarkets.

For six people, I use:

500g fresh mushrooms, sliced
1 small handful dried cepes (porcini), soaked, the soaking water reserved
5 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon fresh thyme, chopped
1 large handful parsley, chopped
1/2 a teaspoon cayenne pepper
juice of 1/2 a lemon
2 pints of stock
5 shallots, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
400g carnaroli rice
1 glass marsala
2 tablespoons creme fraiche
4 heaped tablespoons grated parmesan
3 large knobs of butter
Olive oil
Seasoning

I used shitake mushrooms (meaty, robust little beasts which keep a good, toothsome texture; they don't melt to a slime) and oyster mushrooms (less good, honestly, but still pretty darn nice). I don't wash them, but wipe them instead with kitchen towel so that they don't absorb unwanted water. I fried all the mushrooms (including the cepes) with two of the cloves of garlic and half the thyme in a mixture of butter and olive oil, and when they were cooked, stirred in the parsley, squeezed over the lemon and sprinkled over a little salt and some cayenne pepper.

While the mushrooms were frying, I made the risotto base. The celery, shallots, the rest of the garlic and the rest of the thyme were sauteed in oil and butter, and when soft the rice was added, and then fried gently, without changing colour, for a couple of minutes until transluscent.

I added the marsala, and stirred until it was all absorbed. Then I added the soaking liquid from the cepes and stirred until that was all absorbed. The two pints of stock were then added a ladle at a time, each time stirring and stirring until all the liquid had gone before adding another ladle.

After about twenty minutes, the liquid was all absorbed, and the rice creamy and tender. I stirred in the mushrooms, cheese and creme fraiche. Serve this quickly, while it's still hot and moist. I have managed to convert at least one mushroom-hater with this risotto - try it yourself, and open your arms and welcome winter.

Balsamic vinegar

Elizabeth David describes a Piedmont Pepper which I make quite frequently for a starter. It's very easy - you halve a red pepper (sometimes you may find that cutting the pepper along the ribs which divide it naturally and dividing it into three or four instead works better for you, especially if you have a lot of people to feed), and place in it a slice of raw tomato, a slice of raw garlic, a piece of preserved anchovy as small as your little fingernail, a drizzle of olive oil and a little knob of butter. The whole lot is then baked in a medium oven until the peppers are soft and sweet (about 45 minutes).

My Mum suggests augmenting this recipe with a disk of goats' cheese cut from one of those logs you can buy in the supermarket, some toasted pine nuts and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, which is what you can see in the picture. Lovely stuff - the salty, sharp cheese contrasts with the sweet peppers, and the texture of the pine nuts works beautifully with these soft ingredients.

For once, I didn't have to reduce the balsamic vinegar to get the consistency I needed for drizzling in a sweet, treacly swirl. My brother has recently spent six months living in Modena, and when our parents last visited him, they spent an awful lot of money on a minuscule bottle of balsamic vinegar which, aged in a barrel for 40 years, was considerably older than I am. It's amazing stuff.

Balsamic vinegar this old is a rare and precious thing. A true balsamic vinegar's only ingredients are grapes - some cheaper varieties will add caramel for flavour, colour and texture, but a genuine bottle will only contain Trebbiano and Spergola grapes. The grapes are simmered over an open fire in copper cauldrons until they lose more than half their water content, and the resulting syrupy grape must is placed in wooden barrels with a starter of already-aged balsamic vinegar, which helps fermentation.

The barrels are subject to strict controls; only oak, cherry, chestnut, mulberry, acacia, ash and juniper woods are approved for the aging process. The vinegar takes on deep flavour from the wood it's stored in. A young balsamic vinegar is aged for three to five years - the oldest can be up to 150 years old.

There is an ancient tradition of producing balsamic vinegar in Modena; the earliest reference to the vinegar was made in 1046AD, when a barrel was given as a precious gift to the King, later Emperor Enrico II of Franconia. Its gastronomic application hasn't always been appreciated - balsamic vinegar pops up in historical texts as a panacea to be smeared on festering body-parts or drunk for sore throats and labour pains, and as an antiseptic.

If you are lucky enough to come into possession of a good bottle of old balsamic vinegar, try drizzling a tiny amount on some thin slices of parmesan cheese I've added some truffle-infused olive oil here too) and eating with a glass of something red and robust. Dip a strawberry into a drop. Lean back, smile, and consider how blessed Emperor Enrico was, with his whole barrel of the stuff.

Apple sauce

At the weekend, my Dad cooked some roast pork (roast pork which he did not allow me to photograph, the shy man). Now, clearly, nothing is better with roast pork than a good apple sauce, so I spent twenty minutes the previous evening making some so that it would have a night in the fridge to infuse with quiet background flavours from some spicing and orange peel.

At this time of year the shops are full of handsome, enormous Bramley apples. They're a cooking apple too tart to eat raw (my Grandma used to grow them, and I learned this to my cost), but when cooked they melt into a beautiful, pale, fruity mush.

I peeled and chopped five apples (leaving the cores and seeds intact - there's almondy flavour in those little seeds which emphasises the apple-ness of the sauce), and put them in a pan with half a wine glass of water, three whole allspice berries, four cloves, a stick of cinnamon, two and a half tablespoons of caster sugar and some pared orange peel. Fifteen minutes of simmering reduced the chunks to a fluffy mass.

While the mixture was still warm, I beat in a large knob of butter and a pinch of salt. You only need a tiny bit of salt in this, and it doesn't make the finished sauce at all salty, just underlining the flavour of the sauce.

The mixture, still a bit rough and lumpy (and still full of spice and peel) sat on the side until cool, and then went into the fridge to develop overnight. The next morning, I pushed it through a sieve, making the texture silky and smooth, and getting rid of the spices (nothing is quite as surprising as an unexpected allspice berry cracked between your wisdom teeth). Allspice is a curiously English spice, popping up in all kinds of recipes from cake batters to treatments for game. It's the dried berry of a variety of Jamaican myrtle, and was given its name by English explorers who believed that it combined the flavour of cloves, nutmeg, pepper and cinnamon. It doesn't really; its flavour is very much its own, but in the UK a mixed, ground spice blend is sometimes used as a substitute.

The finished sauce is not a thing of beauty, but it tasted extremely good; fruity with a glossy depth from the butter and spiced in a way that didn't shout at you. Perhaps next time I'll add a little dried chili and some grated fresh ginger. We glopped it all over my Dad's excellent roast pork, and were happy.

Barb Schaller's famous custard cake - with raspberries

I lack a sweet tooth. Mr Weasel's sweet tooth, however, is pointy, fang-like and preternaturally well-developed. So while I slept in late at the weekend, he set about making Barb Schaller's rhubarb custard cake. We didn't have any rhubarb, so he fished some raspberries out of the freezer, and used them instead.

I found this cake recipe on Usenet several years ago. It's very easy, making use of (I'm going to hell) cake mix in a box, and is