Lamb loin fillet with caper butter sauce

I’m having some trouble writing coherently today because I have one eye (OK – two eyes) on the news – I’m obsessing somewhat about the US election, and I really, really hope the polls are accurate. The BBC is currently showing helicopter footage of a queue of voters in Virginia – it’s so long that a helicopter is the only way they can film it.

Here’s a really fantastic lamb dish to serve to someone you’re trying to impress. Loin fillets are seared in olive oil and roasted briefly, so they’re still lovely and pink in the centre, then served with a butter sauce made dense and salty with shallots, anchovies and capers. The anchovies give amazing savoury depth and richness to the dish and go fabulously with lamb, but when cooked like this they don’t taste fishy – in fact, they melt into the sauce so completely that you will be able to serve this to anchovy-haters with no problems.

To serve two, you’ll need:

2 lamb loin fillets
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 shallots
4 anchovies
2 teaspoons capers (use tiny ones in wine vinegar)
1 tablespoon cream
100g salted butter
1 clove garlic
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
Fresh basil to garnish

Crush the garlic and rub it all over the lamb with the lemon zest, a little salt and plenty of pepper. Put aside for an hour at room temperature. Preheat the oven to 200° C.

Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan until it starts to shimmer, and sear the lamb all over in it. The pan must be very hot – you’re aiming to brown the lamb to a lovely mahogany colour. Place the whole, seared fillets in a roasting dish and put in the oven for ten minutes.
When the lamb has had ten minutes in the oven, take it out and rest it in its cooking dish in a warm place for another ten minutes while you make the sauce.

While the lamb is resting, make the sauce. Melt the butter in the frying pan (over a lower heat now) and add the finely chopped shallots. Simmer the shallots in the butter for five minutes, then add the anchovies and cook, stirring, until they have melted into the sauce. Still over a low heat, stir in the cream and capers, then use a balloon whisk to beat the lemon juice into the sauce. Start with half the juice and taste as you add more until you have a sauce which is tart and buttery all at once.

Slice the fillets into medallions and arrange on the plate with a drizzle of the sauce and some basil to garnish.

Hoi sin beer can chicken

This is an extremely tasty hybrid – American barbecue crossed with Chinese roast chicken. Regular readers may already have read my original beer can chicken post, and it’s worth glancing at it again for more on this cooking method, which is one of my favourites for roasting chicken. A can of beer is – how can I say this delicately? – rammed up the chicken’s bottom, and steams the bird from the inside while the outside roasts to a lovely crisp.

Usually, I make chicken cooked in this way with an American-style dry rub. This time, I’ve made a Chinese paste to marinade and cook the bird in, and I’m very pleased with the results. I served this with some steamed rice and sweetly stir-fried carrot and courgettes – about which you can read more later in the week.

To roast one chicken to toothsome perfection you’ll need:

1 chicken weighing around 1.5 kilogrammes
4 tablespoons hoi sin sauce
3 teaspoons five-spice powder
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 piece of ginger about the size of your thumb
3 cloves garlic
1 can lager

Make a paste from the hoi sin, two teaspoons of the five-spice powder, 1 teaspoon of the sesame oil, and the ginger and garlic, grated. Rub it all over the chicken, both inside and out. Leave to marinade for at least three hours (I left mine overnight).

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F), pour half of the can of beer into a glass and drink it, and use a hammer and nail to knock a few holes in the top of the can alongside the ringpull. Sprinkle the remaining teaspoon of five-spice powder into the can (be careful – it will fizz extravagantly, so do this over the sink). Put the can in the centre of a roasting tin. Cut the string holding the chicken’s legs together, pull them apart so it looks like it’s standing up, and push the upright chicken firmly onto the can. I use a very cheap stand, whose wires I’ve bent so you can fit them round the can, when I roast chicken this way – it helps keep the whole apparatus from falling over while it cooks.

There is little dignity in death for chickens.

Roast the chicken for 1 hour and 30 minutes (if you have a large enough barbecue with readily controlled temperature, cook it in there instead of the oven), and remove carefully from the can. Pour away the beer in the can – it doesn’t taste great. Rest the chicken in a warmed dish for ten minutes – it will produce plenty of delicious juices to go with any that have dripped into the roasting tin during cooking. Whisk the juices together with a teaspoon of sesame oil, and pour over the carved chicken. Garnish with some chopped spring onion and serve.

Devilled chicken

Devilling is a Victorian technique for resurrecting drab leftovers. It involves making a spicy paste from mustard, Indian chutney and other storecupboard standards, dressing cold, roast meats with the paste, then grilling until the whole confection is hot. The Victorians were wont to devil anything they could get their hands on; breakfast kidneys were devilled, eggs, hams, mutton chops: let’s be honest here. It was really a way to disguise food which was a bit elderly and didn’t taste that great any more.

In North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell describes some devilled chicken which “tasted like saw-dust”. The cook must have been low on mustard that day. Disraeli’s curiously awful Sybill describes the requirement for a cool glass of water with spicy devilled biscuits (I am still not quite clear on how precisely you’re meant to devil a biscuit – he probably meant that the biscuits were heavy on the chillies). These days, we don’t really use this technique much any more, although I do remember a home economics class at school which culminated with a slightly boingy hard-boiled egg piped full of a gritty orange yolk, mayonnaise and raw spice mixture. Unsurprisingly, I haven’t devilled anything since.

Never say never. Having mentally consigned devilled-anything to the ‘unlikely to be delicious’ pile, I found myself browsing through some of my antique recipe books at the weekend (a very cheap obsession, should you get bitten by the collecting bug; they’re usually available for pennies in bric a brac shops and they’re fascinating; who knew that powdered millipedes were good in a sort of soup for hysteria?) and read through a devilled chicken recipe. It actually sounded pretty good. I looked up another one. It sounded fantastic. Time to swallow my prejudice and get devilling. All the same, I decided to roast the chicken specifically for the dish rather than using leftovers. It was amazingly and unreservedly good, and it’s going to become a regular on our supper table. To devil my four chicken leg and thigh joints (these are almost always the bits left over when you have a roast) I made sure that unlike Mrs Gaskell, I didn’t skimp on the mustard, and that like Disraeli, I had a cold glass of water standing by. You’ll need:

4 chicken thigh and drumstick joints, pre-roasted or raw (see below)
1 ½ generous tablespoons Dijon mustard
1 ½ tablespoons good Indian chutney. I used Patak’s brinjal (aubergine) pickle, but any good mango chutney or similar will also be excellent here.
1 tablespoon chilli sauce
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
A generous amount of pepper and salt
Flour (optional)

I realise this ingredients list sounds pretty peculiar. Persevere with it; Victorian flavours can seem oddly foreign to modern palates, but remain extremely good.

If your chicken is raw, put it in a roasting tin and roast, drizzled with plenty of salt, pepper and olive oil, at 180° C (350° F) for 40 minutes until crisp and golden, and set aside in the roasting tin to cool. If you’re using pre-cooked chicken, just place it in the cold roasting tin and start cooking the sauce.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan and stir in the mustard, chutney, chilli sauce and Worcestershire sauce until you have a thick paste. Remove from the heat. Cut deep diagonal gashes into the meat of the chicken, with another set of gashes across them. Push the paste into the slits in the meat, and spread it generously all over the skin of the chicken. If there’s any paste left, put a dollop under each chicken joint.

Place the roasting tin under the grill about 4 inches from the flame, and grill for 10 minutes until the paste is starting to brown and the meat is hot. André Simon suggests dredging the chicken pieces with flour after you’ve smeared them with the paste in order to achieve a crispy finish. You might want to try this if you’re using yesterday’s chicken, but chicken you’ve just cooked should have a lovely crisp skin underneath the paste, so extra crispiness isn’t really necessary.

Serve with buttered rice or new potatoes and a sharply dressed salad.

Normandy roast belly pork

Roast belly porkPork belly is a fabulous cut. It’s striated with layers of fat between the layers of sweet meat, which, when cooked slowly, melt and baste the joint from within. The English finally seem to be catching on to the idea that belly pork is a good, good thing. I challenge you to find a gastropub menu that doesn’t feature belly pork. It pops up much more often in all kinds of restaurants than it used to (I remember a time not so long ago when the only restaurants serving it were in Chinatown), and it’s appearing much more frequently in supermarkets, so you no longer have to ask for it specially at the butcher’s. It’s also a pleasingly inexpensive cut of meat; you’re paying mere pennies for one of the tastiest bits of the pig, which represents real value.

Pork and apples are natural friends, so I’ve served this slow-roasted joint and its crackling with a cidery, creamy shallot and bacon sauce, and slices of sweet fried apple. Gather your windfalls now – this is a perfect autumn dish.

To serve four, you’ll need:

1kg piece of belly pork
2 large onions
5 rashers smoked streaky bacon
1 sweet eating apple
4 shallots
1 wineglass cider
5 tablespoons crème fraîche
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 150° C (300° F). Use kitchen paper to dry the pork rind well. Score rind of the belly pork in lines about half a centimetre apart with a sharp craft knife, and rub it with salt and pepper. Cut the onions in half and place them, flat side down, in a metal roasting tin, then rest the pork on them – the onions should form a platform for the pork so it doesn’t touch the hot tin and sit in its own fat.

Put the pork in the oven for 3 hours and forget about it. When the time is up, turn the heat up to 200° C (400° F) for a final 20 minutes. Remove the pork from the oven and put it under a hot grill until the skin crackles evenly (about five minutes). Keep an eye on the pork under the grill – it is easy to singe the skin. Finally, leave the pork in a warm place to rest while you prepare the sauce.

Normandy roast belly porkChop the bacon into little lardons and fry without any oil in a non-stick frying pan. When the bacon is crisping up, remove it to a bowl, keeping any bacon fat in the pan. Slice and core the apple, leaving the skin on. Fry the apple slices in the bacon fat until golden and set aside. (If the bacon hasn’t released enough fat, use a spoonful of pork fat from the roasting tin.) Finally, slice the shallots finely and brown them in the bacon fat over a medium flame. Keeping the pan on the heat, add the bacon to the pan, pour over the cider and bring it to the boil for two minutes to burn off the alcohol. Add the crème fraîche to the pan and stir well, and finally add the cooked apples.

Serve the pork on a bed of the sauce and apples with some mashed potato and a green vegetable.

Crispy Chinese roast pork

I am pathetically proud of having successfully cooked a strip of Chinese roast belly pork (siew yoke or siew yuk, depending on how you transliterate it) at home. This pork, with its bubbly, crisp skin and moist flesh is a speciality of many Cantonese restaurants. An even, glassy crispness is hard to achieve if you’re making it at home, but I think I’ve cracked it; with this method, you should be able to prepare it at home too.

You’ll need a strip of belly pork weighing about two pounds. Here in the UK you may have trouble finding a belly in one piece (for some reason, belly pork is often sold in thick but narrow straps of meat); look for a rolled belly which you can unroll and lay flat, make friends with a pliant butcher or shop at a Chinese butcher (you’ll find one in most Chinatowns). Look for a piece of meat with a good layer of fat immediately beneath the skin. The belly will have alternating layers of meat and fat. Try to find one with as many alternating strips as possible.

To serve three or four (depending on greed) with rice, you’ll need:

2lb piece fat belly pork
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon five-spice powder
½ teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon Mei Gui Lu jiu (a rose-scented Chinese liqueur – it’s readily available at Chinese grocers, but if you can’t find any, just leave it out)
3 cloves garlic, crushed
2oo ml water
2 tablespoons Chinese white vinegar

Bring the water and vinegar to the boil in a wok, and holding the meat side of your pork with your fingers, dip the rind in the boiling mixture carefully so it blanches. Remove the meat to a shallow tray and dry it well. Rub the sugar, salt, five-spice powder, cinnamon, Mei Gui Lu jiu and garlic well into the bottom and sides of the meat, leaving the rind completely dry. Place the joint rind side up in your dish.

Belly porkUse a very sharp craft knife to score the surface of the rind. If your rind came pre-scored, you still need to work on it a bit – for an ideal crackling, you should be scoring lines about half a centimetre apart as in this photo, then scoring another set of lines at ninety degrees to the original ones, creating tiny diamonds in the rind. Rub a teaspoon of salt into the rind. Place the dish of pork, uncovered (this is extremely important – leaving the meat uncovered will help the rind dry out even further while the flavours penetrate the meat) for 24 hours in the fridge.

Heat the oven to 200° C (450° F). Rub the pork rind with about half a teaspoon of oil and place the joint on a rack over some tin foil. Roast for twenty minutes. Turn the grill section of your oven on high and put the pork about 20cm below the element. Grill the meat with the door cracked open for twenty minutes, checking frequently to make sure that the skin doesn’t burn (once the crackling has gone bubbly you need to watch very closely for burning). The whole skin should rise and brown to a crisp. This can take up to half an hour, so don’t worry if the whole thing hasn’t crackled after twenty minutes – just leave it under the grill and keep an eye on it.

Remove the meat from the heat and leave it on its rack to rest for fifteen minutes. Cut the pork into pieces as in the picture at the top of the page. Serve with steamed rice, with some soya sauce and chillies for dipping. A small bowl of caster sugar is also traditional, and these salty, crisp pork morsels are curiously delicious when dipped gingerly into it.

Honey-mustard roast chicken

Roast chickenThis is a very easy and totally delicious way to roast a chicken. The honey-mustard baste keeps the flesh moist and plump, and dribbles into a bed of roast onions which caramelises to a sticky sweetness. The skin on a chicken cooked like this is fantastic – crisp and honeyed with a lovely zing from the baste.

To roast one medium chicken you’ll need:

1 roasting chicken
1 lemon
5 onions
1 handful fresh parsley
1 tablespoon soya sauce
1 heaped tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 heaped tablespoon whole-grain mustard (I used Grey Poupon)
2 heaped tablespoons honey

Preheat the oven to 190° C (357° F).

Remove any excess fat from the inside of the chicken and discard. Zest the lemon and put the zest aside in a bowl, then slice the lemon in half and push it into the cavity of the chicken with one halved onion and the parsley. Chop the remaining onions roughly and use them to make a little mound to stand the chicken on in the bottom of your roasting tin.

Add the soya sauce, both mustards and the honey to the lemon zest in the bowl and mix well. Put two tablespoons of the mixture inside the chicken and place the bird on top of the onions. Smear another two tablespoons over the outside of the bird. (Don’t worry about making sure the baste gets on the onion base – it will drizzle over them in just the right quantity as you baste the chicken.)

Roast chickenCover the chicken with foil and place in the oven for 1 hour and 15 minutes, basting with a little of the honey-mustard mix every twenty minutes or so. After the 1 hour and 15 minutes, remove the tin foil from the bird and turn the heat up to 210° C (410° F). Continue to cook for another 15 minutes, checking that the skin browns but does not char (keep an eye on it and replace the tin foil if you feel it’s getting too brown). Remove from the oven, rest for ten minutes (the chicken will produce lots of savoury juices) and serve with the roast onions from the bottom of the pan, roast potatoes and a green vegetable.

Sage, onion and apple stuffing balls

Sage, onion and apple stuffing ballsThis was one of my Grandma’s recipes. She was not an awfully good cook (you can still make my mother pale by saying ‘trifle’ or ‘Grandma’s mushroom thing’ to her); she refused to turn the oven up to any sort of temperature which might make its insides dirty; she taught me to make an omelette out of nothing but eggs, butter, parsley and about half a bottle of Worcestershire sauce; and she used the kind of cottage cheese that comes with bits of pineapple in to make her lasagne. I miss her.

This recipe was one of her good ones, and we often make these very simple stuffing balls to accompany roast meats. To make about sixteen little balls, you’ll need:

1 packet sage and onion stuffing mix
1 large onion
5 leaves fresh sage
1 eating apple
500g good sausagemeat
3 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper

Make up the stuffing mix according to the packet instructions, adding one tablespoon of butter with the boiling water. I much prefer good old Paxo to the wholemeal, organic, lumpy brown premium brands, but feel free to go with your favourite. Chop the onion and cored apple into dice about the size of a woman’s little fingernail. Chop the sage finely.

Stuffing ballsPut the sausagemeat (if good sausagemeat isn’t available near you, buy some good sausages and pop the meat out of the skins), stuffing mix, chopped sage, apple and onion in a mixing bowl, and use your hands to squash and mix all the ingredients together with some salt and pepper. Divide the mixture into small balls and arrange in a non-stick baking tray. Dot the stuffing balls with the remaining butter. Cook for 40 minutes at 180° C (350° F) and serve alongside your Sunday roast.

Roast duck with tarragon creme fraiche sauce

This is probably the worst photo I’ve ever put on this blog – this duck is out of focus and really ought to have been photographed later, once it was plated up. There’s a reason for this – the little guy was smelling so good that the hordes gathered around the table had the duck carved, chewed and well on the way to being digested about fifteen seconds after the shutter closed.

I’ve mentioned roasting ducks before in relation to collecting the fat for use in potato dishes later. This recipe should ensure you a perfectly crisp, deliciously seasoned and glazed skin, fragrant and toothsome flesh, and plenty of delicious creamy gravy to anoint the meat. A large duck like this (the plate it’s sitting on is a giant one) should serve four.

1 large duck
2 spring onions
1 lemon
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground paprika
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon fleur de sel
1 bunch tarragon
1 bunch parsley
250 ml stock (use a good pre-prepared stock or make your own with the bird’s giblets)
3 tablespoons crème fraîche
1 tablespoon quince jelly (use redcurrant jelly if you can’t find quince)
1 glass white wine
1 teaspoon cornflour
1 ½ teaspoons light soya sauce

Remove the bag of giblets from inside the carcass before you begin, and use the contents to make stock. Take any poultry fat out of the inside of the duck along with any excess skin, and use it to make gratons.

Dry the duck carefully inside and out with kitchen paper. Use a fork to prick the skin all over the bird (this will help excess fat to escape and help the skin to crisp beautifully), and place the halved lemon and the spring onions inside its cavity. Mix the salt and the spices together in a bowl, and rub the skin well with them, keeping a teaspoon of the mixture to one side. Sprinkle any remaining rub inside the bird. Place on a rack in a baking tray in an oven preheated to 200° C (400° F) for 45 minutes per kilogramme plus 15 minutes, basting every half hour with its own fat. (The duck will release a lot of fat; that rack is there to make sure that the bird doesn’t sit in the fat and burn.)

Chop the herbs very finely and combine them with the quince jelly in a separate bowl.

To make the sauce, take the stock and bring to a simmer, reducing until flavourful. Stir the cornflour into the cold glass of wine and tip the mixture into the bubbling stock with the crème fraîche and the teaspoon of rubbing mixture you reserved when you prepared the duck. Keep the pan on a low simmer.

Ten minutes before the end of the cooking time, use a teaspoon to ‘paint’ the uppermost skin of the duck with the jelly and herb mixture and return the bird to the oven. Keep a teaspoon full of the jelly/herb mixture and stir it into the sauce. Taste the sauce and add more jelly or tarragon and salt if you think it needs it.

The duck will be beautifully glazed, its skin crisp and savoury from the spice rub. Rest the bird for five minutes once it comes out of the oven and serve with roast potatoes, a sharp salad to cut the richness of the flesh, and some green vegetables. Remember to decant the fat from the roasting tin into a large jar to keep in the fridge for roasting and frying potatoes.

Chicken pieces roasted in homemade barbecue sauce

This is a one-dish recipe requiring very little attention once it’s in the oven – a good option when you have guests for dinner and you want to talk to them before eating rather than skip in and out of the room in an apron with a spoon all evening.

If you’re not comfortable cutting a chicken into joints at home, you can ask your butcher to joint it for you. If you don’t have easy access to a friendly butcher, you can make this dish with a mixture of chicken thigh and leg joints from the supermarket instead – it’s important, though, to use chicken pieces with the bone in and the skin on for ultimate tenderness and flavour. This barbecue sauce is made from dried spices, soya sauce and white wine. It’s strong and delicious, so serve with plenty of rice (I cooked mine with a little saffron) or another plain starch to soak up all the flavour.

To serve four, you’ll need:

1 large chicken, jointed
4 shallots, cut into large dice
150ml white wine
150ml soya sauce
1 tablespoon tomato puree
1 tablespoon sundried tomato puree
1 inch of fresh ginger, grated
5 cloves garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon mustard powder
1 teaspoon chilli powder (chipotle powder is nice here for the smoky flavour)
1 tablespoon liquid smoke (leave this out if it’s unavailable where you live)
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 200° C (400° F).

Space the chicken pieces evenly in a large metal baking dish, and sprinkle the shallot pieces around them. Drizzle with a little olive oil and bake for 30 minutes, until the chicken is browning and the pieces of shallot are starting to take on colour at the edges. A lot of fat will have rendered out from the chicken skin, so use a tablespoon to remove as much of it as you can.

Mix all the other ingredients in a measuring jug and whisk with a fork to make sure everything is well blended, then pour evenly over the chicken pieces and shallots, trying to make sure all the chicken is nicely coated. Put back in the oven for another 30 minutes, basting twice, and serve immediately.

If, by some amazing freak of appetite, you don’t eat this all in one go, the chicken is great the next day taken off the bone in sandwiches.

Pulled pork

This is a wonderful American way with pork. Barbecue purists (a curiously wonderful breed made up entirely of American men – I have never met a woman or a non-American who takes the barbecue quite as seriously as these guys do) should haul out their smokers for this recipe. One team at the American Royal Barbecue championship last year had a smoker made from the body of a Cessna aeroplane.

I used my oven and added a tablespoon of liquid smoke at the end.

The smoke flavour in this recipe is a great addition (UK cooks can buy liquid smoke online – I haven’t found a brand I’ve not enjoyed, but Colgin makes a particularly good version). All the same, if you don’t have access to a small adapted aircraft or liquid smoke, you shouldn’t worry. Your pork will still have a wonderful, barbecue sauce flavour.

In the US you’d use pork butt (actually shoulder) for this recipe. In other countries like the UK we butcher pigs rather differently, so just find a nice, fatty, boned piece of shoulder if you can’t get your hands on the exact cut. The fat is important; the joint cooks for a long time and its fat will baste it from within and keep the meat delectably moist.

To serve about six people you’ll need:

One boneless pork butt or boneless shoulder (about 3 lb)
4 tablespoons soft light brown sugar
2 tablespoons coarse salt
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons cinnamon powder
1 tablespoon mustard powder
10 turns of the peppermill
1 tablespoon chilli powder (I used chipotle chilli powder for the smoky taste, but you can use your favourite)
1 teaspoon coriander powder
1 teaspoon onion salt
12 fl oz (1 ½ cups) apple juice
6 fl oz (¾ cup) water

Mix all the dry ingredients in a large bowl, and rub them thoroughly all over the pork in the same bowl. If your cut of meat has been boned and rolled, you can push some of the rub into the space where the bone used to be as well, seasoning the meat inside and out. Leave the meat in the bowl and leave, covered, in the fridge overnight.

About six hours before you want to eat, preheat the oven or smoker to 150° C (300° F). Place the pork joint, skin side up, on a rack in a roasting tin. Pour the apple juice and water into the bottom of the tin. (The liquid should not be touching the meat.) Cover the roasting tin tightly with a few layers of tin foil and place in the oven for five hours. Don’t poke at the pork while it’s cooking; it should be left to steam gently in its tinfoil hat.

When the five hours are up, remove the tinfoil. If the liquid in the pan looks like it might dry up, add a wine glass of water. Turn the heat up to 200° C (400° F) and cook the joint uncovered for half an hour. Remove the meat to a large bowl, keeping the juices in the bottom of the roasting tin.

Use two forks to shred the pork. It’ll come to pieces very easily after the long cooking time, and should be moist and delicate with a slight crisp to the outsides. Place the shredded pork in a large frying pan with all its juices and the liquid from the roasting tin. Add another tablespoon of soft light brown sugar, an extra teaspoon of chilli powder if you want some extra kick, and a tablespoon of liquid smoke if you can find some (I like applewood liquid smoke for this recipe). Cook over a medium heat until the liquid in the pan begins to become syrupy.

Serve the pork with its sauce in toasted burger buns. The pork will keep in the fridge for a couple of days. Sweetcorn, coleslaw and other traditional barbecue accompaniments make a great side dish. Try not to get too much down your front.