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Cheese and chorizo baked potato

I seem to be having a bit of a thing about chorizo at the moment. Blame this never-ending winter – a hot blast of smoke, paprika and garlic is surprisingly uplifting when it’s this steadily grim outside.

This is a great storecupboard dish, and one that goes down very well with kids (if yours don’t tolerate the heat of the paprika, substitute a teaspoon of Dijon mustard. You can also use good ham, preferably home-cooked, in place of the chorizo). This is fatsome and packed with carbs: it’s absolutely not a diet dish. Cook it on a day when you’ve been yomping in the woods or chopping logs. To serve four, you’ll need:

Four large potatoes
1 tablespoon olive oil
75g cream cheese
100g grated cheddar cheese
1 clove garlic, crushed into a paste
2 banana shallots, diced finely
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
1 chorizo ring
1 handful (about 25g) chopped parsley
1 large pinch salt, plus salt to rub on the skins

Preheat the oven to 200°C (450°F). Use your hands to rub the olive oil into the skins of the potatoes, and dredge them with plenty of flaky salt. I used smoked Maldon salt, which marries nicely with the other smoky flavours in this dish. Bake the potatoes for an hour and a half.

While the potatoes are cooking, chop the chorizo into small pieces and fry them in a dry pan until the fat is running. Set aside. Chop and grate the other ingredients.

When the potatoes are ready, slice them in half and, holding the potato in an oven glove, scoop out the flesh into a mixing bowl. You’ll be left with a nice little potato-skin cup. Stir the cheeses (reserving a little cheddar to sprinkle over the top), shallot, garlic, parsley and paprika into the fluffy potato with a large pinch of salt, and when everything is well-mixed, stir in the chorizo and its fat. Pile the mixture back into the potato skins, and top with the reserved cheese.

Return the filled skins to the oven for another 20 minutes, until golden brown on top, and serve piping hot.

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Chicken and chorizo risotto

This is a very, very tasty use of all of those bits from a roast chicken that you don’t get round to eating on its first appearance on the table. I rather enjoy stripping a cold chicken carcass after a roast: popping the oysters out of the underside, shredding the meat from a leftover leg with my fingers, and spooning any jellied juices into a bowl with the scraps. Now, those bits of chicken will serve to make a very fine sandwich with plenty of salt and pepper, but you can also make them work a bit harder as part of a rich, creamy risotto for supper the next day.

The quality of your chicken stock here is all-important, and the risotto will be much better if yours is home-made. I like to buy those very cheap boxes of chicken wings and pop them in a stockpot with the stripped carcass, some aromatics (bay, carrots, shallot and celery), a covering of water and a slug of white wine. You can make a handsome amount of stock like this, and freeze what you don’t use immediately.

To serve four, you’ll need:

As much meat as you can save from a roast or poached chicken (I had a whole leg and thigh, and scraps from the breast and underside, but you’ll be fine with less meat)
1 dried chorizo ring
320g Carnaroli risotto rice
1 litre hot chicken stock
75ml vermouth
3 banana shallots, diced finely
2 sticks celery, diced finely
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
Zest of 1 lemon
75g frozen peas
60g grated parmesan cheese
30g butter
Salt and pepper

Chop the chorizo into coins, and each of those coins into quarters. While you cook the risotto, cook in a frying pan without oil until the chorizo is becoming crisp and the fat is running – once it reaches this stage, remove it from the heat and set aside.

In a large pan, saute the shallots and celery with the bay and fennel in the butter until the shallots are soft, but not taking on colour. Add the rice and continue sauteing over a low heat until the rice is coated with butter and looks translucent. Stir in the shredded chicken meat and pour over the vermouth, and stir until all the liquid is absorbed into the rice.

Add a ladle of the hot stock and simmer, stirring until the stock is absorbed. Add another ladle of stock and repeat until all the stock is absorbed into the rice, and the risotto is thick and creamy, the grains of rice al dente. This should take about 20 minutes. Stir in the lemon zest with the peas and parmesan, and check the seasoning, adjusting to taste. Remove from the heat and leave covered for 5 minutes.

Remove the lid and stir the chorizo with its oil through the risotto, reserving a few pieces to scatter over the top. Serve immediately.

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Refried beans with salsa and chorizo

This photo reminds me that the kitchen really, really needs painting in a colour that doesn’t look like bloodless frogs.

Anyway. About the food. This is my slightly European-ised (and it’s no worse for that) take on Mexican refried beans. You can serve yours in chi-chi little towers like this if you’re feeling all…retentive, or you can just dollop piles of beans, salsa and avocado/crème fraîche on the plate however you fancy. I have a sense that life is probably too short for chi-chi little towers.

This recipe makes more in the way of beans than you’ll eat at one sitting; you’ll probably get two or three meals for four out of the amounts below. (The salsa amounts below are for one meal.) This is because the long simmering of the beans and the making of the sauce that flavours them is quite time-consuming, so it’s worth making plenty and freezing the remainder before you mash them to cook quickly at a later date if you want to save yourself some work. To keep the chorizo crisp, you’ll need to fry some up each time you make this (although you can, of course, leave it out, especially if you have a vegetarian to feed); chopping and frying the sausage is not so much of a hardship, though, given how good it tastes.

Refritos, despite the title of this post, doesn’t actually mean ‘refried’, but ‘well-fried’. These are really worth the effort; they’re silky-smooth in the mouth, and intensely savoury: a billion times better than anything you might have had out of a can. Amazingly, they also do not make you fart. To make a large panful of beans for three meals and enough salsa for one meal, you’ll need:

Beans
500g pinto beans
3 bay leaves
5 cloves
2 dried chillies
1 large onion
1.5l water
1 can tomatoes
4 banana shallots
6 anchovies (yes, even for anchovy-haters – see below)
1½ tablespoons smoked Spanish paprika
2 tablespoons chipotle chillies in adobo
Bacon fat or chorizo fat to fry
1 dried chorizo

Salsa
Six medium tomatoes (vine-ripened is your best bet at this time of year)
½ banana shallot
1 small handful (about 15g) coriander
A squeeze of lime juice
1 avocado
crème fraîche

Chop the onion into rough dice and put it in a large saucepan with the rinsed beans, bay leaves, cloves, dried chillies and water. Bring to a simmer, put the lid on and simmer for 2½ hours, until the beans are soft. Check during cooking to make sure there is plenty of water for the beans to swim around in, adding a little more if you think they need it.

When the 2½ hours is up, halve the shallots and cut them into half-moons. In a large frying pan, saute them in two tablespoons of bacon fat or chorizo fat (using these fats does simply astonishing things to the flavour of this dish, but you can use olive oil if they make you nervous or if you are not the sort of person who keeps jars of such artery-clogging things in the fridge) with the anchovies. The anchovies will melt and break down. They will not make the dish taste at all fishy – they just add an unidentifiable and delicious richness and depth to its structure. Keep sauteeing, stirring every now and then, until the shallots are golden. Add the tin of tomatoes to the pan with the chipotles in adobo and Spanish paprika, and simmer until thickened. Using two different kinds of smoked chillies may look like overkill, but they both have very different characters, the chipotles dark and chocolatey in their heat, and the paprika much brighter. Together they’re fantastic here.

Add the thickened mixture to the beans pan with a tablespoon of salt (smoked Maldon salt is good, but isn’t totally necessary) and return it to the heat, this time uncovered. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the liquid in the pan takes on a texture like the sauce in a can of baked beans. You’ll be able to tell when it’s ready; it can take anything from 45 minutes to a couple of hours.

You can serve the beans now as a kind of baked bean. This is also the point at which you should stop to reserve two thirds of the beans for cooking later on. Set the third you are using for refried beans aside until you are nearly ready to eat.

For the salsa, just peel and seed the tomatoes, dice and mix with the diced shallot and chopped coriander, and squeeze over lime juice to taste. Chop a chorizo into coins, quarter each of these coins and dry-fry them until they are crisp and rustling in the pan. Set aside in a small bowl, reserving the fat for another go at the beans.

To fry the beans, eat 2 tablespoons of bacon or chorizo fat in a large saucepan until very hot. Mash the beans in their sauce with a potato masher. They shouldn’t be completely smooth, but work at it until most of the beans are reduced to a paste. Dollop the paste into the hot fat. It will hiss and spit. Use a wooden spoon to stir the beans around in the frying pan, and keep stirring every couple of minutes until all the fat is absorbed and the liquid from the beans has evaporated to leave them thick and dense.

Stir the crispy chorizo into the beans and serve with a hearty spoonful of the salsa, some sliced avocado and a good dollop of crème fraîche. This makes a great meal on its own. If you’re feeling greedy, it’s also a brilliant accompaniment for a steak.

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Roast chicken quarters with chorizo stuffing

I’m a big fan of the sorts of stuffing you can push into pockets underneath the skin of a chicken, leaving the skin to crisp up beautifully over the savoury filling. Stuffings like these should be fatty enough to baste the chicken from beneath the skin, leaving the meat moist and juicy; flavoursome enough to give their character to every bite of the meal; and reasonably dense, so they don’t swell and leak out of the sides of the skin when you cook them. This one’s an absolute doozy.

I’ve used chicken quarters here rather than a whole chicken – they cook a little faster, you’ll get more nice nibbly crispy bits, and it’s a bit easier to distribute the stuffing evenly this way. To serve four (or in our case two, with some left over for sandwiches), you’ll need:

4 chicken quarters
125g chorizo (use half of one of those dry looped sausages, and choose a good-quality one)
75g fresh white breadcrumbs
Juice and zest of ½ lemon
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1½ teaspoons fennel seeds
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 220°C (420°F).

If you don’t have any breadcrumbs in the freezer (I usually pop the stale ends of any white loaves in the Magimix and whizz them into crumbs, then freeze them – it means there’s usually a decent supply of breadcrumbs kicking around if I need them), blitz them in the food processor before you deal with the other ingredients.

Put the chorizo in the food processor bowl and reduce it to a rubbly texture, like fine gravel. (You’re aiming for little chunks, not paste.) In a separate bowl, use a spoon to mix the chorizo rubble with the crumbs, the juice and zest of half a lemon and the coriander and fennel seeds, which you will have ground up roughly in a mortar and pestle.

Use your fingers to poke little pockets under the skin of the chicken quarters, and push a quarter of the stuffing mixture into each pocket, pressing so it is firmly packed. Season each chicken piece on both sides with salt and pepper. Heat some olive oil in a large frying pan and brown the stuffed chicken quarters, skin side down, for 5-7 minutes, until the skin is taking on some colour.

Transfer the chicken pieces, skin side up, into a large baking dish. You don’t need to add any more oil – there’s plenty in the chorizo. Roast at 220°C (420°F) for 15 minutes, then turn the heat down to 180°C (355°F) for half an hour. Rest the chicken pieces for a few minutes before serving. We ate this with some halloumi sautéed with red peppers and sweet onions, and some rice, the savoury chicken juices spooned over.

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Chorizo al vino

Chorizo is fantastically savoury, and makes a great tapas dish just frizzled up in its own oil in a pan, with no adornment. But if you feel like doing something a bit special with it, your chorizo will be even better cooked and marinated in red wine, creating gorgeously boozy, smoky, spicy, porky juices to dibble lots of bread in.

It’s worth preparing a couple of cured chorizos at once, even if there aren’t that many of you eating – this recipe keeps well in the fridge, the flavours becoming deeper and richer, so you can bring the dinner table to Spain again in a couple of days’ time. Once again, I don’t recommend that you use your best wine for this. A Spanish vino tinto (bog-standard red wine) will be absolutely fine.

To serve four to six as a tapas dish, depending on how many other dishes you are serving, you’ll need:

2 cured chorizos (I prefer a spicy one, but if you don’t like chillies, choose a mild chorizo)
1 bottle red wine

Prick the whole chorizos all over with a fork, and put them in a saucepan with the whole bottle of wine. The pan should be small enough to allow both sausages to be covered with the wine. Bring the wine to a gentle boil and continue to simmer it for twenty minutes with the lid on.

Remove the wine and chorizo from the heat, and set it aside with the lid on overnight at room temperature for the flavours to marry.

When you are ready to eat, remove the chorizo from the pan, reserving the wine, and chop it slantwise into chunks about 1½ cm thick. Put the pieces of chorizo in a large frying pan with half the wine, and cook over a high heat, turning the chorizo frequently, until the wine has reduced to a few tablespoons and the chorizo is crisp from the heat and dark from the wine. Pour the chorizo, the wine reduction and the savoury oil released by the cooking into a dish and serve with plenty of bread to mop up the delicious juices.

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Golden winter vegetable soup with frizzled chorizo

Golden vegetable soupSoothing, sweet, buttery, winter vegetables are a real blessing when the weather’s cold. Plants keep a store of energy in the form of sugars in their tubers and roots, and those tubers and roots make for some surprisingly uplifting eating. This soup is passed through a sieve after being liquidised to ensure a silky, creamy texture. If you don’t own a food processor you can still make it – at the stage where the ingredients go into the processor bowl you can just mash them with a potato masher for about ten minutes, then pass the resulting mush through a sieve, pressing it through with the bottom of a ladle. You will end up muscular and with a very good pan of soup.

Because of all the plant sugars in these vegetables, you’ll find you need something salty to counter the sweet taste. I’ve cut chorizo into coins and fried it until it’s crisp and friable – a lovely contrast in texture with the silky, creamy soup. The result is a lovely sun-coloured dish at a time of year when the sun is a distant memory.

To serve four as a main course, you’ll need:

1 small celeriac
3 small sweet potatoes
1 small swede
1 small butternut squash
1 small onion
2 shallots
1 parsnip
3 carrots
1 leek
3 tablespoons butter
1 litre chicken stock (vegetarians can substitute vegetable stock and use croutons instead of the chorizo)
200 ml double cream
2 teaspoons salt
½ a nutmeg, grated
10 turns of the pepper mill
2 tablespoons chopped chives

Peel all the vegetables and cut them all into 1-inch chunks. Melt the butter in a large pan with a heavy base (this will help the soup cook evenly – I recommend Le Creuset pans, which are made of enamelled cast iron, and disperse heat beautifully) and sweat the vegetables, stirring regularly, until they begin to soften. You’ll find that the sweet potato pieces may brown a little. Don’t worry about it; they contain so much sugar that it’s hard to prevent a little of it caramelising, and it just gives depth to the soup.

When the vegetables are softening evenly, pour over the hot stock. It’s best if your stock is home-made, but some of the liquid stocks you can buy at the supermarket these days are a good substitute if you don’t have any in the freezer. Bring the stock and vegetables to a simmer, cover with a lid and leave for 20 minutes or until all the vegetables are soft all the way through.

While the soup simmers, slice a chorizo into pieces about the same size as a pound coin and fry over a medium flame in a dry frying pan, stirring and flipping the pieces occasionally. The chorizo will release its fat and the pieces will become crisp. After about 20 minutes, when the chorizo is crisp and dry, remove the pieces and drain on paper towels. Reserve the oil.

Transfer the vegetables and stock to a large bowl and liquidise in batches, passing each processed batch through a sieve back into the large pan. You will find you need to push the soup through the sieve with the back of a large spoon or ladle. Return the pan to a very low heat and stir in the cream, salt and pepper and the grated nutmeg. Bring to a simmer and serve with a drizzle of chorizo oil, some chorizo scattered over (keep some more in a bowl for people to help themselves) and a sprinkling of chopped chives.

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Tortilla Espaniola

We’ve done Spanish omelette before – this one really takes the biscuit, though, and deserves its own spot. Asparagus is appearing in the shops (early – it’s from continental Europe); tiny, sweet sugar snap peas (Kenya – the food-miles-goblin has been doing his work this week) are on the shelves, and suddenly my habit of buying emergency chorizo whenever I see it does not look so daft.

This recipe works best when the vegetables you use are sweet either through long, slow cooking (the onions and red pepper) or through their near-raw freshness (the asparagus and peas). Combined with soft potato, which takes on all the flavour of the onions, and with salty, spicy chorizo, these sweet vegetables become something very special.

I particularly enjoy this dish cold (it’s often served as a cold tapa in Spain). It’s also good hot, but try it if you have a lunch party in the summer; you can make it the night before and serve it at room-temperature alongside other nibbles. This quantity will make enough for six (or for three, hot, for dinner and three, cold, at lunch tomorrow). You’ll need:

2 large onions, sliced finely
2 red peppers, cut into strips
5 small potatoes, peeled (not new potatoes if possible)
2 rings of chorizo, cut into coins
10 stalks asparagus cut into thumb-sized pieces
1 handful sugar snap peas
10 eggs
1 handful cheddar cheese, grated
1 small knob butter
Salt and pepper

Start by sauteeing the onions gently in the butter for ten minutes in a large non-stick frying pan, stirring occasionally. Add the potatoes and the peppers, and continue to cook for another 15-20 minutes, until the potatoes are not so soft they’re collapsing, but pleasantly toothsome. Mix the chorizo, peas and asparagus with the ingredients in the pan, and quickly beat the eggs with some salt and pepper. Pour the eggs over the mixture and cook for another ten minutes.

Sprinkle the tortilla with the cheese (don’t smother it; this is for colour and a kick of flavour, not a duvet) and bung the whole pan under the grill for 5-10 minutes, until the egg mixture is cooked through and the top is bubbling and crisp. Serve with a green salad.

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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.

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Spanish, no flies

chorizoWe had two sets of friends round for lunch today. This presented a bit of a problem; first off, they’ve both got very small children I like spending time with, and the children create problems with punctuality. It is remarkable, according to parents I know, how nappies are filled, vomit is produced and knees grazed the very minute you want to leave the house. I needed to cook something I could leave on the stove for an hour or so, in case of lateness, and which would also need little attention if I wanted to play with the kids.

I ended up with a weasely interpretation of a Gordon Ramsay chorizo casserole, first introduced to me by my teetotal mother-in-law. I am not, of course, worthy to make changes to recipes by the divine Gordon, but I am also considerably too big for my boots, so I have made changes with gay abandon.

The original recipe reads:

SPLIT RED LENTIL AND SPICY SAUSAGE STEW
Serves 4

Split red lentils are a real store-cupboard essential, ready to be thrown into a winter soup or stew as a natural thickener. Chorizo is another useful winter standby – it keeps in the fridge indefinitely and will jazz up all manner of dishes.

1 medium chorizo
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp paprika
2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 sticks celery, finely chopped
2-3 red peppers, finely chopped
1l brown chicken stock
6 plum tomatoes, skinned and deseeded
250g red lentils
2 tbsp freshly chopped coriander
2 tbsp freshly chopped parsley

1 Cut the chorizo sausage into fairly thick chunks, about 2.5cm long. Heat the oil in a large sauté pan or casserole, add the paprika and garlic, and cook for 30 seconds. Add the sausage, onion, celery and peppers. Cook for 2-3 minutes or until the sausage begins to sizzle. 2 Add chicken stock, tomatoes and lentils, reduce the heat and simmer for 1-2 hours. 3 Sprinkle with the fresh herbs and serve immediately.

I mess with this recipe in a thoroughly disrespectful manner, especially considering that it’s
from the pen of Gordon, Canon of the Casserole; for six people I use two chorizo, a couple of tablespoons of paprika, a teaspoon each of fennel and cumin seeds with the paprika, and four peppers, leaving the amounts of onion, celery, stock and tomato the same. (I cheat and use two tins of plum tomatoes.) Towards the end I add a wine glass of marsala (anathema to my poor mother-in-law, who doesn’t know what she’s missing) and about half a lemon’s worth of juice.

What is it with the British and paprika? Here, it’s sold in pathetic quantities; you buy it in spice jars of the same volume as those they sell star anise, coriander seed and . . . everything else in. For a while now I’ve been buying spices and herbs at Daily Bread, a wholefood warehouse in Cambridge where they sell them by the jam jar or by the enormous plastic bag. They’re mildly barking wholefood Christians, but the spices are great, so I ignore the God stuff and just pillage their shelves, thinking wicked, gluttonous thoughts.

There is no point in buying a pathetic pot of paprika from the supermarket; this recipe (like many Spanish and Hungarian recipes) requires two tablespoons of the stuff, which means a good half-pot in supermarket terms. Paprika is powdered, dried capsicum or red pepper; it isn’t chile-hot like cayenne pepper, but has an almost smoky, deep sweetness. Here is a phenomonal amount of powdery redness with the fennel, cumin and garlic.

I fry all the spices together in olive oil, then add the chopped vegetables, and stir-fry with vigour, dancing all the while in an inappropriate manner to a kid’s album by They Might Be Giants, in an attempt to get in the mood for the four small visitors who are arriving soon. The chorizo rings do contain some chili, but not enough to hurt little mouths.

Once the vegetables are blanched, I add the lentils, stir fry a little longer, and then add the tomatoes and liquids. This will now be perfectly happy sitting on the stove for a few hours, which gives me ample opportunity to do my dinosaur impressions in the living room once my guests arrive.

A word of caution; I am not a parent, and so I’m very prone to over-simplify around child-feeding-philosophy. I do believe that bright colours go down well, though, and that bite-sized bits work well too. The neophobe toddlers I’ve been playing dinosaurs with (I feel that I have done my work for the day in inculcating feelings of omnivorous superiority to the herbivore Brontosaurus. The kids and I have decided that he is beneath contempt, lacking any normal, healthy interest in sausage) are especially interested in eating this once they’ve had a stir and dropped some extra sausage in. (Later, we go into the garden and pick our own apples and pears. A miracle occurs – suddenly the children are interested in eating fruit.)

We serve up lunch with a good splodge of cous-cous, flavoured with shallots, fennel, cumin and coriander. The kids throw a lot of it around, but also ingest a surprising amount. My work here is done.

The children later gravitate to the television, which we have pre-prepared with lots of DVDs of cartoons by Hayao Miyazaki. We grown-ups sit around the kitchen table, drinking a ridiculously potent chestnut liqueur which I bought in France on holiday. One Dad tells me that we must invite them round again soon; he likes the way I cook.