Crostini al funghi – mushrooms on toast for grown-ups

Mushrooms on toast is a noble and ancient English nursery tea. When I was tiny, I read Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit and loved it dearly; Little Grey Rabbit would peel the pinky-beige satin skins off field mushrooms and stroke them before cooking them on her stove. In love with the bunny, I developed a fascination with mushrooms.

I’m grown up now. I can’t eat mushrooms on toast without being all post-ironic about it. In this form, though, kiddies’ mushrooms on toast becomes elevated to a dinner party amuse bouche; a gorgeous, silky, creamy, rich cloud of mushrooms on crisp slices of grilled ciabatta.

I still eat it for tea. What the hell; I’m posh.

To serve three for a grown-up nursery supper, you’ll need:

1 large knob of butter
1 punnet small chestnut mushrooms, sliced thin
1 punnet shitake mushrooms, sliced thin
4 shallots, chopped finely
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small handful (palmful, really) dried porcini mushrooms, soaked
A glug of Marsala
1/4 pint cream
Juice of half a lemon
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 large handful chopped parsley
Salt and pepper
1 ciabatta

Melt the butter over a medium heat in a non-stick pan until it’s bubbling gently, and turn the fresh mushrooms, shallots and garlic into it. Saute, stirring frequently, until they soften and give up their juices. Add the soaked porcini, and continue to saute until all the juices have evaporated.

Add the Marsala (about a shot-glass full) and simmer until it’s all evaporated and the alcohol has burned off. Add the cream, cayenne pepper and mustard, and stir in the lemon juice, tasting all the time (you might want to use more or less than half a lemon). Simmer until the mixture bubbles and thickens, stir in the parsley off the heat, and season to taste.

While you cook the mushrooms, slice a ciabatta diagonally into ten, and toast the slices until crisp. Pile the mushrooms on the ciabatta slices, and serve immediately. Little Grey Rabbit was missing a trick.

Hummus with whole spices

This one’s a real favourite for those days when I’m working at home. Homemade hummus only takes about five minutes to make, tastes great, and is cheaper and better than anything you’ll get from the cold aisle in the supermarket.

When my brother and I were kids, hummus and pitta bread was a favourite breakfast, up until the day I got called garlic-breath at ten-o-clock by a girl in gym at school. I swore off it for a few sensitive teenaged years. Since then, I’ve learned not to care about upsetting those around me by eating garlic. (Life’s too short; I once had a boyfriend whose mother worked as a teacher and wouldn’t eat garlic until she had retired, lest the children smelled it on her breath. For God’s sake; it’s Chicken Kiev, not twenty whiskies and soda. Nowadays I just ensure that the people I feel like doing gym with are also eating plenty of what I eat. Poor, reeking Mr Weasel.)

Hummus is one of those dishes that has been around for so long that its origins are now uncertain. It’s from somewhere in the Middle East, and variations on it pop up all over the place; there’s even an Indian version. Hummus bi tahina is made from pureed chickpeas (called garbanzo beans in America) and tahini, a paste made from crushed sesame seeds. The cumin in this is typical of Egyptian hummus – the other spices are in there because I like them.

Work by volume. For every volume of cooked, cold chick peas you use, you’ll need half that volume of tahini, so if you’re using canned chick peas (as, I’m afraid, I do, because to soak, cook and cool them would ruin the whole five-minute lunch-ness of this), you’ll need half a can’s-worth of tahini. If you’re going for the long haul and are organised enough to remember to soak them the night before, you’ll find home-cooked chick peas even nicer, and you can spend a few minutes dry-frying the spices too.

For a one-can lunch for two, you’ll need:

1 can chickpeas
1/2 jar tahini
Zest and juice of one lemon
1 teaspoon whole cumin seeds
2 teaspoons whole coriander seeds
1 teaspoon whole fennel seeds
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon salt
Olive oil to drizzle
Paprika to sprinkle

Put the chick peas, tahini, lemon zest (not the juice), whole spices, garlic and salt in a blender, and whizz until everything is smooth. (You’ll still have some spice pieces in there; this is a good thing. When you bite one unexpectedly, you’ll thank me.) Add the lemon juice and stir it in by hand, tasting frequently until you’ve got the desired tartness. (Add a bit more if you like, or put lemon wedges on the plates when you serve.) Drizzle with olive oil, and powder the whole thing with paprika.

Salad cream – edible by human beings

Sometimes, bad, bad things happen to good recipes. Until a few years ago, I imagined that salad cream had always been that unspeakable pasteurised egg product out of a bottle by Heinz. My grandma was a lady fond of boiled eggs and cucumber, which she always anointed with a hearty gulp of the stuff. It was perfectly repellent – eggy, slimy and wafting fumes of vinegar strong enough to knock out a medium-sized rodent. (Grandma was not characterised by her love for salad cream; she was, in fact, a lady of otherwise splendid taste. I think the salad cream thing was something to do with rationing in the war. I hope it was, because otherwise this means that I might have a vinegar-loving chromosome lurking somewhere in my genome.)

Then, I found a copy of Mrs Beeton, whose recipe for salad cream did not sound remotely like the wet slick Grandma used to top our salads with. It was a recipe full of good, fresh things; a hard-boiled egg yolk, cream, mustard and so on. I braced myself and made it. It was bloody marvellous. I’ve changed the recipe a little since then (fresh lemons are more freely available these days, and I think Mrs Beeton liked her salad cream rather more tart than modern salad-munchers might like), and present it for your eating pleasure.

You’ll need:

1 hard boiled egg yolk
6 tbsp double cream
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp Dijon mustard (no seeds)
½ tsp caster sugar
¼ tsp salt
Juice of ½ a lemon

Mash the egg yolk with the back of a spoon, and add all the rest of the ingredients except the lemon juice. Mash furiously with the spoon until you’ve got a creamy paste. (If you still have any lumps, pass through a sieve, and you’ll end up with a perfectly smooth mixture.) Add lemon juice to taste. (Mrs Beeton uses vinegar, which you can try if you like; use a white wine vinegar or a cider vinegar. She does, however, use two tablespoons of the stuff, which is far too much. Exercise caution.)

This is, against all reason, a really excellent salad dressing. It’ll keep in the fridge for about three days. It’s also extremely good with cold new potatoes, over warm asparagus and on eggs instead of mayonnaise. Spend the five minutes it takes to make some, and encourage your Grandma to stop buying the Heinz stuff.

Spice-crusted chicken with Boursin stuffing

Regular readers will note that I’m very fond of Boursin – the garlic-spiked cream cheese which comes in a dear little corrugated tinfoil hat. It’s got a lot more kick than the Philadelphia variety, and I find it much more robust in cooking than other cream cheeses.

It may be a mass-produced cheese, but Boursin actually has quite a history behind it. It’s been around for more than forty years, and was the first large-scale soft cheese production business in France. François Boursin took the idea behind the meal of fromage frais and herbs eaten in French villages (it was a popular meal in Gournay, his own home town), and turned it into “All-natural Gournay cheese”. The ad campaign with the “Du pain, du vin, du Boursin” tagline has been around for nearly as long; it started in 1968, and you can still buy wedge-shaped bits of Boursin for your cheeseboard, if you are the sort of person who has a cheeseboard and thinks Boursin belongs on it.

I like it very much on bread, but Boursin really comes into its own when it’s hot, and acting as a hard sauce.

For this dish you’ll need (per person):

1 breast joint of chicken with skin and bones
1/2 round Boursin
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
Butter, olive oil, salt

Push your fingers under the skin of the chicken until it’s loosened and you’ve got a little pocket under all the skin. Push the Boursin under it, squashing and flattening until you’ve forced it all into the pocket. (This is a lot of cheese for a little chicken; just keep going until it’s all packed in there.) Smear any that’s left over the outside of the breast – it’ll help the crust to stick.

Bash the coriander, cumin and a pinch of salt in a pestle and mortar; you’re aiming for a rough grind, so don’t go mad with it. Press the spices and salt into the skin side of the chicken breast (which you have cleverly prepared by making it sticky with cheese).

Melt butter (about a teaspoon per breast) and a slug of olive oil in a large, non-stick frying pan which will fit in your oven (if you don’t own one, use a non-stick roasting tin on the hob) over a high heat, and put the chicken breasts in it, skin side up, for three minutes. Turn the breasts skin-side down when your three minutes are up, and put the whole pan in the oven at 180c for 25 minutes.

You’ll end up with a sweet, toothsome chicken breast annointed with a creamy garlic sauce, and a crisp, herbed skin. Serve with rice, to soak up the cheese and the chicken’s spicy juices.

Incidentally, the corn in this picture, which I served with the chicken, is white corn (maïs blanc) which I found in France, produced by good old Green Giant. The kernels are paler, smaller and longer than normal niblets, and they’re delicious; buttery and sweet. If anybody has seen any in the UK, please let me know. I’ve only got two tins left, and I seem to have become addicted.

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.

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.

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.

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.