Pork rillettes

Dr W pitched up with two kilos of pork belly a few weeks ago, having spotted it on offer at the butcher's. If you're familiar with this blog, you'll know that there are plenty of options here for cooking this particular cut - it's one of my favourites. Mind you, who wants to roast or casserole in this weather? Time to experiment with some charcuterie.

Rillettes (pronounced ree-etts) are a kind of coarse pate, made from gently cured meat poached in stock and its own fat (and, in this case, some fat from a duck) for hours until it becomes soft, falling into shreds. The fat is there to carry the flavour to the tastebuds, to provide some really world-beating texture, and as a preservative; once you've sealed your rillettes into sterilised jars, covered with a layer of the creamy fat, nothing will be able to get in there, so you'll be able to store them in the fridge for months. I'd recommend, in fact, that you don't eat your rillettes as soon as you've made them if you can possibly help it; a week or so in a jar will allow the flavours to develop fully.

Traditionalists will tell you to cure your meat with nothing but salt and pepper before cooking, and to avoid adding extra flavourings to the meat as you poach it. Traditionalists are, in my experience, a bloody miserable lot. My brother (currently right off pork, as he recovers slowly from swine flu) makes spectacular rillettes at Christmas, which he packs with lots of crushed juniper berries. I like mine garlicky and boozy, with plenty of aroma from a generous scattering of herbes de Provence, and some bay, lavender and thyme from the garden. To make your own (reduce the amounts if you want, but this keeps very well and makes an excellent gift - given that it's mildly fiddly, you'll be rewarded for making a large batch), you'll need:

2kg pork belly
1kg pork shoulder
2 bulbs garlic
2 heaped tablespoons herbes de Provence
2 tablespoons salt
6 fresh bay leaves
1 small handful (20g) thyme
1 small handful (20g) lavender leaves
750g rendered pork fat (I used duck fat from the confit I made earlier this year - you can also substitute goose fat here)
2 glasses white wine
Pork stock or water

Cut the pork (leaving the skin on the belly) into long strips about 1 inch square, and put it in a large mixing bowl. In a mortar and pestle, grind the salt, bay, thyme, lavender and herbes de Provence together. Rub the resulting mixture all over the strips of meat, cover and refrigerate for 48 hours. Curing the meat like this before cooking (you'll notice that the confit the duck fat came from was cured in a similar way) gives it what the French call a goût de confit - a very specific and delicious flavour you only really find in confited meats.

When the meat has cured, chop the strips, retaining the belly skin, into smaller pieces, about the size of your thumb. Put the meat and any salt and herbs from the bowl in a large casserole dish with the unpeeled garlic bulbs, chopped in half across their equators, and pour over the wine. Carefully pour over stock (I happened to have some pork stock in the freezer, but if you don't, don't worry about it - water will be fine) until it barely covers the meat, then spoon the rendered fat into the casserole dish. Heat the oven to 150°C and bring the casserole dish to a very gentle simmer on top of the stove. Pop it into the oven with the lid on and ignore it for five hours.

Remove the casserole from the oven and remove the meat and garlic from the liquid ingredients with a slotted spoon, putting them in a large mixing bowl. Leave the liquid in the casserole to stand and separate while you work on the meat.

When the meat is cool enough to handle, use your fingers to remove the skin from the belly pieces and discard it - it's done its work now and will have given up its gelatin to the cooking liquid, which you'll be using in a bit. Shred the meat (now lovely and soft, with all the fat rendered out) into another bowl, and squeeze the garlic from its skin into the bowl of shredded meat, discarding the skin. When all the meat is shredded evenly, use a ladle to skim all the fat from the liquid in the casserole, and put it in a jug. You'll be left with a glossy stock in the pan. Stir two or three ladles-worth of the stock into the shredded meat to moisten it, and pop the rest of the stock in the freezer for another day. Now ladle the liquid fat into the shredded meat bowl and mix everything in the bowl thoroughly and evenly, reserving a couple of ladles of fat to cover the rillettes in their jars. (Exactly how much you'll need depends on the size of jar you're using.) Taste the contents of the bowl for seasoning - this recipe benefits from some robust salting.

Pack the rillettes into sterilised jars, leaving half an inch of room at the top of each one for the fat you'll seal them with. (I also popped some in a terrine dish for serving to friends later in the week.) Pour fat into each jar/dish to cover, seal, and refrigerate until you come to eat them. I like to let the rillettes come to room temperature before spreading them on chunks of baguette, with some caper berries and cornichons on the side to cut through the velvety fat.

L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon, London W1

In London for a day of Ladies' Nice Things, my Mum and I had decided to take advantage of L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon's (020 7010 8600) set lunch menu (£25 for three courses - cooking at this level is hard enough to find anywhere in the capital, let alone at this sort of price). There is little as good for the appetite as perching on the world's plushiest bar stools and looking over the open finishing kitchen as a synchronised team of young French chefs waltz around each other in pressed, white formation, whipping potatoes, peeling baby artichokes, and slicing truffles.

We'll start this one back-to-front, at the point where the bill arrived. We noticed the two glasses of champagne we'd opened the meal with (for what is worth celebrating more than a nice day out with your Mum?) had been omitted from the receipt, and called the server over to ask him to add them on. He didn't miss a beat, but said 'Not at all; if the champagne has not appeared on the bill, please accept it with our compliments'.

Good dining's not all about what's on your plate. Service, noise level, comfort and the beauty of the room (and this room is like a red and black-lacquered Japanese box with a living wall of leaves) all have their part to play, and here all those elements slot neatly together to result in a real joy of a restaurant. Robuchon, who was named Chef of the Century back in the 1980s by Gault Millau, has 25 Michelin stars divided between his neat squadron of a dozen restaurants in cities all over the world. I've eaten in the Las Vegas Atelier and the London one, and quality, style and service are absolutely consistent between the two restaurants.

Meals at l'Atelier are presented either as small plates which the diner can select tapas-style from the menu; as larger plates to be enjoyed as a starter, main course and dessert; or as a dégustation set (£110) of the smaller plates chosen by the chef. Some of these dishes have become famous in their own right and are always found on the tasting menu: the quail stuffed with foie gras; the mashed potato, which is 50% butter and whipped into a cloud of silk. Robuchon's cooking is of the voluptuously rich school that he was instrumental in founding after France's flirtation with nouvelle cuisine; your meal here will be smooth with butter and oils and dense with meticulous, slow-cooked flavours.

That lunch menu is a magnificent introduction to Robuchon's cooking; at any rate, I'm not sure I could cope with the richness of the dégustation menu at lunchtime. There are two choices for each of the three courses, and the menu changes with the day's market. Salmon rillettes were packed with dill and fresh horseradish (which is, incidentally, making an appearance on market stalls in Cambridge at the moment - local readers should head out and grab a root for a horseradish sauce recipe I'm planning for next week) - hot-smoked salmon whipped into crème fraîche, studded with fat jewels of cold-smoked salmon, accompanied by a sharp salad made from paper-thin slivers of fennel. Soups are always fresh and frequently thick with cream - my broccoli soup had a crouton floating on top, slathered with tapenade and a spoonful of sweet onion confit which reminded me of the French onion soup (so good I'm never ordering it anywhere else again) I had there back in March.

Razor clams are something you seldom see in British restaurants, and I always order them when I see them. They're a beautiful shellfish, large, sweet and tender to the tooth. These were from Colchester, superbly fresh; and had been removed from the shell, then gratinated with a leek fondue, butter-soft, and Parmigiano. Not a trace of the fine, sandy grit that almost invariably clouds razor clam dishes - and I was thankful for an epi of bread from the basket which staunched some of the butteriness. Patte noir chicken was roasted (I suspect the involvement of a rotisserie grill) to a lovely, butter-aided succulence with a mahogany-crisp skin. We'd asked for a bowl of mashed potato in addition to the lunch menu - even if it's not on the menu, they'll find some for you - and agreed we could happily live on the stuff, and possibly in it too.

Wine pairings are suggested for each dish, and we asked for a glass each - a 2007 Montlouis to go with my clams, and a Stonier Pinot Noir from Australia with the chicken. Both beautifully selected, the Montlouis reflecting the butter-sweetness of the clams, and the Pinot Noir really European in character - plenty of fruit, but closer to a Burgundy in style; lovely stuff. I got back from the ladies' (a dim spot in the excellent design - it's all very elegant, but the lights in there make you look like the living dead) to find my Mum happily launched on a second glass, which she claimed would help her pudding down.

A set of five slim slices from different tarts is a dessert that usually appears on the £25 menu. I'm not a huge fan of the signature dessert, a Chocolate Sensation (you are likely to be far fonder of chocolate than I am - I suspect it's a genetic abnormality, given that Mum's really not into it either). The Chocolate Sensation was the only dessert on offer with the lunch menu, but I asked whether they had the tarts, and five minutes later two helpings arrived, beautifully plated and for no extra charge. And that's absolutely typical of the service at l'Atelier. It's both graceful and gracious, and they will bend over backwards to help you - witness the business with the champagne. The tart selection has changed every time I've visited, but if you are lucky you might encounter the cinnamon custard on filo pastry or the puckeringly sharp lemon tart. Keeping seasonal produce in mind, there was a strawberry shortcake topped with three perfect fresh strawberries and a sort of raspberry clafoutis arrangement - and even chocolate agnostics like us decided the chocolate, caramel and hazelnut concoction, smooth and dense, was about as good as such things get.

Coffee here is great, but I'd suggest you walk the 100 yards to the Monmouth St Coffee House for my favourite cup of coffee in London if you can get off the barstool. (I am 5'2". I find such things challenging.) Mum was thrilled with lunch - I believe she's taking my Dad back to l'Atelier next week for a date.

Cassoulet

No photos of this one, since cassoulet à la Liz, once dished up, turns out to look totally unlovely; and I really don't want to scare you off, because it tastes divine. I hope you made the duck confit (I have cunningly recycled the picture here from that recipe) from a few weeks back, which, along with its fat, forms an important part of this dish. If you didn't, though, you can usually find tins of excellent Castelnaudry confit in good delis in the UK (I've also seen it in Waitrose).

Cassoulet is one of those social-climbing dishes, which began life as a French peasant dish full of preserved meats and dried beans, and now gets sold for vast amounts of money in swish restaurants. You can buy tins of cassoulet, but a cassoulet you have made at home is even better, especially in mouth-feel. It's a wonderfully warming dish, and it's fantastic to serve to friends; somehow it's an especially cheering and convivial thing to eat. You can serve it up as is, or with crusty bread and a salad. I've used Japanese panko breadcrumbs here, which are not at all French. I'm developing a slight addiction to them - wonderfully crisp, with a slightly malty flavour and a perfect balance between absorbency and crustiness, they're terrific for topping baked dishes or making breaded coatings for baked or fried meats. If you can't find any, normal white breadcrumbs, whizzed in your food processor, will be absolutely fine. If you're in France, try to pick up some of the wonderful long, white haricot beans (haricots blancs lingots) which are traditionally used in cassoulet and have an amazingly creamy texture. They're hard to find in the UK, so I have fallen back on standard haricots, which are a shorter bean. They are still excellent in this dish.

Thanks not least to Iris Murdoch (whose A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which contains a very stressful cassoulet incident, managed singlehandedly to put me off making cassoulet myself for about fifteen years), cassoulet has a bit of a reputation as a complicated, work-intensive dish. It's really not all that bad; most of the work is done by your oven, with you stirring occasionally to help the slow-cooked beans become tender and creamy, and while there are short bursts of frying, skimming and stirring, you can easily fit all the other things you have to do in a day at around the long cooking time. Packed with moist pork belly, fat duck legs and garlicky sausage, this isn't for days when you're worrying about your blood pressure - as always, my philosophy on these things is that the rush of endorphins you get when eating something that tastes this good more than cancels out any health negatives, and hey - I understand beans are good for you.

To serve six, you'll need:

500g haricot beans
2 large onions
2 sticks celery
1 carrot
5 cloves
1 bouquet garni
1 large sprig rosemary
1 large sprig thyme
3 bay leaves
6 fat cloves garlic
1 tablespoon herbes de provence
¼ bottle white wine
4 tomatoes, chopped roughly
400g slab pork belly
3 confit duck leg and thigh joints
6 garlicky sausages (if you can find saussice de Toulouse, they're traditional here, but any very dense, meaty sausage will be good)
Japanese panko breadcrumbs OR bog-standard white breadcrumbs to sprinkle

The night before you want to eat, soak the beans in plenty of cold water. In the morning, drain the beans, discarding the soaking liquid, and put them in your largest casserole dish (you'll need plenty of spare room in there for the cooking liquid, the other ingredients and the eventual swelling of the beans) with the bouquet garni, the rosemary and thyme, one of the onions, halved and studded with the cloves, the carrot, halved lengthways, one stick of the celery, two of the bay leaves and two of the garlic cloves, peeled and left whole. Chop the pork belly, complete with its rind, into 1 inch chunks, and add it to the saucepan. Pour over cold water to cover the contents of the pan by a couple of inches, and bring to the boil, skimming off any scum that rises to the surface.

When the pot is boiling, lower the heat to a simmer and put the lid on. Ignore it for an hour and a half while you brown the sausages in a tablespoon of the fat from the confit in a frying pan. Remove them to a plate, and use the sausage pan to fry the remaining onion, garlic and celery stick, chopped finely, until soft, in another large tablespoon of duck fat. Preheat the oven to 180° C.

Remove and discard the herbs and vegetables (except the garlic and the bouquet garni) from the beans mixture and drain and reserve the liquid (now stock) from the casserole dish. Return the beans and pork to the casserole, adding the onion, garlic and celery mixture, the chopped tomatoes, the remaining bay leaves, the sausages and the confit duck legs. (Don't worry about scraping off any fat clinging to the legs - it'll just add to the wonderful texture.) Pour over the wine and add the reserved stock from the pork and beans to just cover the mixture. Add a tablespoon of salt. Bring the contents of the casserole to a simmer on the hob and put it in the oven for two hours with the lid on, stirring every half an hour.

When the two hours are up, there should be no visible liquid; the whole cassoulet should have an even, creamy texture. Taste for seasoning - you will probably need to add extra salt. Sprinkle the top of the cassoulet with the panko crumbs or breadcrumbs, and cook for another 20-30 minutes with the lid off, until the crumbs are brown and the cassoulet is bubbling through it in places. Serve up, making sure everyone gets a bit of duck, a bit of sausage, and a bit of pork with their creamy beans and crusty top.

Chocolat Chocolat, St Andrew's St, Cambridge

I've wittered on at length here before about the sad fact that Cambridge is something of a food desert. Restaurant-wise, we could still improve a lot, but if you're a food shopper, things seem to be looking up considerably. Besides long-standing old favourites like the excellent Cambridge Cheese Shop in All Saint's Passage, the increasingly impressive offerings at the daily market, Origin8 (a deli where you can find some obscenely good pies and organic hogroast) and local village offerings like the River Farm Smokery in Bottisham (look out for Dan on The Great British Menu on the BBC) and the farm shop at Burwash Manor Barns, the city has just found itself home to one of the loveliest chocolate shops I've ever set foot in. This is a very splendid thing, and I hereby upgrade Gastronomy Domine's assessment of Cambridge's food situation from desert to leafy wetland.

Chocolat Chocolat (which is so new that it doesn't have a website yet, and so good that they named it twice) is on St Andrew's St, just by the entrance to the Grand Arcade. Isabelle and Robin Chappell have imported a sugary morsel of France to the city - Isabelle prepares Bayonnaise slabs of chocolate at her tempering machine by the window, Robin serves up what I am certain is Cambridge's best icecream (the Alfonso mango sorbet is rich, curiously creamy and made me consider driving the car over and stealing the freezer), and the whole shop ripples with gorgeously selected frou frou.

The main event is, of course, chocolate, and here you'll find tiny tongs and little wooden punnets which you can fill with hand-made chocolates from several chocolatiers, hand-picked by Isabelle and Robin. There are also chocolaty offerings from Dolfin, Bovetti and Willie Harcourt-Cooze - the Bovetti black mustard seeds enrobed in dark chocolate (there's also coriander seeds in milk chocolate and anis in white) and the Dolfin bar flavoured with masala spices are must-tries. Robin says that Bovetti's paté a tartiner (imagine Nutella, but approximately a thousand times nicer) sold out pretty much as soon as they opened, but more is on the way. There's so much on offer here that it'll take even the most dedicated chocoholic weeks to work their way through the whole selection - which is precisely as it should be.

Isabelle is originally from France, and alongside the chocolates, she and Robin have imported some sugary nibbles I've never seen on this side of the Channel before. Fight through the inevitable crowd of French students to get to the Carambars (a stick of caramel which should be familiar to anyone who's ever been on a French exchange), the chocolate-coated marshmallow bears and the utterly divine callisons. There are Cote Garrigue jams in flavours like lavender and Cavaillon melon; nougat straight from Montelimar, scented with rose, violet and pistacho; Anis de Flavigny cachous; Palets Bretons (the world's butteriest, most friable biscuit) and Madeleines from Commercy. Robin doesn't know it, but in promising Pain d'Epice (gingerbread - but so much better than what you're used to) direct from Dijon soon he made my heart flutter like a schoolgirl's.

I plan to head back as soon as possible to apply a further good, hard sugar shock to my pancreas. Chocolat Chocolat is one of the most exciting additions to the town centre I've seen in years - head over there as a matter of urgency if you're in town, and tell them I sent you.

Duck confit

Confit de canard, the French way with duck which is cooked and preserved in its own fat, is unequivocally delicious. French tins of the stuff are scrumptious, and although pricey, not too hard to get hold of. But making your own at home turns out to be surprisingly easy, and it tastes even better than the store-bought variety (the magic is all in the herbs you use to cure the duck before cooking). Making your own also means that even when you've finished eating, you end up with lots of herby, aromatic duck fat to use in potato dishes, or even in another confit.

Because the meat is simmered very gently under duck fat, it remains extremely moist and tender, with a skin that crisps up deliciously at the click of a finger. I like mine served, totally unhealthily, with a great big heap of pommes Sarladais and a dollop of quince jelly. Redcurrant, cherry and the other duck-friendly fruits also work really well to cut through the richness of the confit.

To confit six duck legs (with thigh attached) you'll need:

6 duck leg joints, with thigh
3 heaped teaspoons salt
2 bay leaves
1 tablespoon thyme leaves
1 tablespoon herbes de Provence
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
Duck fat (enough to completely cover the duck legs when melted in a saucepan)

Crush the bay leaves, thyme, herbes de Provence and peppercorns very thoroughly with the salt in a mortar and pestle, and rub the pieces of duck all over with the mixture. Put the duck in a large bowl and refrigerate for 48 hours to achieve a very mild cure.

When you are ready to cook the duck, heat the oven to 150°C and melt the fat in an oven-proof casserole dish on the hob. Slide the duck into the fat as it liquefies, and when it starts to shudder (not boil), move the casserole to the oven. Cook for two and a half hours, or until the duck is tender.

Spoon the cooked duck and its hot fat into a large sterilised jar or crockpot, making sure that the meat is completely covered by the fat, which will stop oxygen and bacteria getting in. Seal and refrigerate. The duck will keep for a few weeks in the fridge (it is, after all, preserved) - it will also be tender, sweet and moist from being poached in that fat.

It's worth leaving the duck in the fat for a few days before you eat it, in order to allow the flavours to develop. To serve and cook to a crisp, remove the confit from the fat and fry over a medium heat in a saucepan for about 7 minutes per side, with a heavy pan lid weighing the meat down as you fry.

Pommes Sarladais - French garlic potatoes

In my mental spreadsheet of The Very Best Things You Can Do With A Potato (everyone should have one of these), Pommes Sarladais come in near, if not at, the very top. If you visit the Dordogne region of France, you'll find these on every menu; in this area where duck and goose farming is so common, and the fat from those birds so ubiquitous in cookery, this preparation of potatoes comes as naturally as breathing.

This is an intensely rich, garlicky recipe. The peeled potatoes are par-boiled, then sautéed in generous amounts of duck or goose fat until golden and crisp. In the last few minutes, pulverised garlic is briskly stirred through the hot fat and crunchy potatoes, and finally the finished dish is tossed with a handful of aromatic, fresh parsley. This is an ideal accompaniment for duck confit, roast chickens, dense and boozy stews - almost anything rich and European. (Insert Silvio Berlusconi joke here.)

Choose a floury potato for this recipe. I like King Edward potatoes here - if you can't find any, try Desiree, which have a pleasant sweetness that works well against the robust flavour of the garlic. I'm recommending a more generous amount of potato per person than you might expect here, simply because this is so tasty that people do tend to overeat. The semolina dusting doesn't make it into the standard French recipe, but I gave it a whirl after hearing about the Nigella Lawson semolina trick with English roast potatoes, and found that it raises the golden crispiness to a simply heavenly level around the soft interior of each bite - this dish is the mouth-feel equivalent of about 80 naked, silky angels bopping lewdly to the best bits of ABBA. Admittedly, Pommes Sarladais are full of all those things you're meant to be avoiding after Christmas like animal fat and carbs, but I'm convinced that the joyful endorphins you'll produce while munching on them more than make up for that. So to serve four, you'll need:

1kg King Edward or Desiree potatoes
5 heaping (and I mean heaping) tablespoons duck or goose fat
5 large, juicy cloves garlic
1 large (hand-sized) bunch flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon semolina flour
Generous amounts of salt

Peel the potatoes, and cut them into squares of about 1 inch. Bring a large pan of water to the boil and drop the potatoes in. Bring back to the boil and simmer for four minutes. While the potatoes are simmering, bring the duck or goose fat to a high temperature in your very largest frying pan. (If you don't have one large enough to house all the potato chunks in a single layer, split the dish between two pans.)

Drain the potatoes well in a colander, and return them to the saucepan you parboiled them in. Sprinkle over a heaped tablespoon of semolina flour and toss the potatoes well. The semolina should be coating the potato chunks unevenly - tossing the potatoes will have caused their edges to bang up against each other and become craggy and fluffy.

Ladle the semolina-coated potatoes into the hot fat in a single layer. Cook, turning every few minutes, until the potatoes are evenly crisp and gold (about 20 minutes). As you turn, you may feel that the pan is becoming dry - if this is the case, add another tablespoon of duck or goose fat.

While the potatoes are cooking, pulverise the garlic by crushing or grating. When the potatoes are gold, add the garlic to the pan and toss the potatoes around the pan for four minutes to make sure all the garlic cooks and is distributed throughout the whole dish.

Remove the cooked potatoes to a large bowl and toss with the chopped parsley and a generous sprinkling of salt (these can take a lot of salting, which is an excellent excuse to do some tasting as you season). Serve immediately.

Basque chicken

I seem to get through an awful lot of bell peppers at this time of year, when sunshine is a dim and distant memory. This dish is a rich and glossy version of the traditional Poulet Basquaise, where the sweetness of the peppers works deliciously against tiny pieces of salt pork and the savoury chicken.

I got hold of a strip of salt pork from the Polish deli in Newmarket. (Just off Fred Archer Way, by the short-stay carpark on Wellington St.) A lot of towns, especially here in East Anglia, now have Polish stores selling some really fantastic preserved meats like smoked sausages and fat salt pork. I've also been using our local one to stock up on soused herrings, some great pickles and the holy grail - cartons of cherry juice. If you have a Polish shop near you, go in at the weekend and have a rummage; you'll find some really interesting ingredients and, if you're lucky, will discover a new addiction to that cherry juice.

Salt pork is much fattier than English bacon, and it's not smoked. Stock up if you find some; it keeps for months in the fridge. There should be more fat in a slice than meat. Here, I've rendered it down into crisp little nuggets, and have used the rich rendered fat to brown the chicken and soften the vegetables in this dish. If you can't find salt pork where you are, fatty pancetta or even fatty bacon lardons will do the job nicely. To serve four, you'll need:

100g salt pork
4 large chicken breasts
½ teaspoon caster sugar
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pepper
2 tablespoons paprika
1 teaspoon fennel
3 bayleaves
1 teaspoon dried pimento chillies
2 red peppers
2 green peppers
1 yellow pepper
4 cloves garlic
1 banana shallot
1 medium onion
4 stalks celery
2 glasses wine
2 glasses chicken stock
500g passata
1 tablespoon tomato purée
2 tablespoons crème fraîche
Salt and pepper
Parsley to garnish

Slice the peppers into strips, and put them aside in a bowl. Put the diced shallot and onion and diced celery in another bowl with the crushed garlic. Rub the chicken breasts with the sugar, salt and pepper.

Cut the salt pork into small dice (about half a centimetre) and put in a large, heavy-based casserole dish. Cook over a low to medium heat, stirring occasionally, until all the fat has rendered out and the dice of pork are tiny and golden. Turn the heat up to medium-high and brown the whole chicken breasts on all sides in the fat. When they are golden all over, remove them to a plate with a slotted spoon. Turn the heat back down to medium-low.

Add the paprika, bay leaves, crushed chillies and fennel seeds to the pan with the shallots, onion, celery and garlic. Sauté in the remaining fat (adding a little olive oil if you think it's necessary) for about five minutes, until the vegetables are soft. Add the peppers to the pan and cook for another five minutes, keeping everything on the move, then return the chicken to the pan along with any juices, stirring well so the paprika mixture coats everything.

Add the wine to the dish, and let it bubble up to a simmer. Pour in the stock and passata and stir a tablespoon of concentrated tomato purée through the mixture. Put the lid on and simmer for 30-40 minutes. Stir through the crème fraîche just before serving, and garnish with parsley.

I served this with sautéed potatoes. It's also great with buttered rice and a salad.

Ambassade de L'Ile, London

If you'd asked me last week, I'd have said that it was impossible to accidentally book a table at a two-star chef's new restaurant while remaining firmly under the impression that you were booking something quite different. My poor Dad, on phoning to confirm the table at what used to be one of his favourite restaurants, even started the conversation with: "Hello. Is this Lundum's?" And the person picking up said "Yes." (The correct answer would have been "No. Lundum's closed six months ago. This is l'Ambassade de L'Ile.") The waiter did acknowledge that we are not the first party this has happened to. It's a bad way to start a meal, and I hope they sort things out at their reservations desk; l'Ambassade has no need to rely on the reputation of the excellent restaurant that used to occupy this building, and everyone in our group started the evening extremely irritated at the mix-up.

Still: on getting there, we decided to stay; we had all, after all, travelled between two and three hours to get there, we were seduced by the colour scheme (aubergine shag-pile carpet! White panels of leather with what looked like a dear little belly button in the middle of each one!), and I'd read about the chef, Jean-Christophe Ansanay-Alex before. I was secretly rather thrilled to have the chance to try his cooking. His L'Auberge de l'Ile in Lyon has two stars; he used to cook for Christina Onassis; he only has one arm. Prices here are extraordinarily high, but we were celebrating; it's nearly Christmas; and I've been cooking tofu, pork hock and oxtail and other budget proteins for weeks, so was feeling like a bit of cream and truffles. The à la carte had numbers on it which looked to be denominated in rupees rather than pounds (no starter came in under £25), so we all went for the £90 tasting menu, reasoning that three à la carte courses weren't going to come in at much less than that.

I'm still a little uncomfortable about the price, especially given that we fully intended to pay for our half, but had our credit card batted away by my Dad, who gets into Father Christmas mode at this time of year. £90 (without wine from the pricey list - and my Kir Royale alone cost £15) seems a hell of a lot to pay for a meal in the current financial climate, especially when you find yourself picking your way through a clot of tramps swigging lager outside South Kensington tube station on your way home.

Ansanay-Alex's tasting menu does, at least, try as hard as it can to justify its price. It's almost a pastiche of Lyon's rich, buttery, creamy cuisine, and there's a sense that somebody has sat down with a checklist of the most expensive ingredients, making little ticks as he works his way down through scallops, lobster, caviar, white truffles, black truffles and foie gras. The problem with constructing a menu like this is that all sense of balance goes out of the window, with creamy veloutes, buttery Béarnaises and sabayons, absurdly dense reductions and heavy, rich farces rampaging through the menu like a herd of oily buffalo.

L'Ambassade is generous with amuse bouches at the start of the meal and with friandises at the end. A heap of herbs fried in a tempura batter arrives before you've even ordered, and our amuses included a really lovely croquette of black pudding in a cider reduction alongside a tiny clam shell filled with a truffly mirepoix of sweet vegetables, topped with the poached clam.

The menu opens as it means to go on - with a mind to the eventual death of your liver. A velvet-smooth cream of scallop soup had a mosaic of lobster-marinaded scallop slices and squares of melting butter resting on the surface. A teaspoon of caviar (the farmed French variety) was inserted into a soft-boiled hen's egg, surrounded by a thankfully tart lemon sabayon. Sea bass, its oily skin cooked to a salty, crisp bark, sat on a fondant potato (always a show-off accompaniment - they're hard to cook well, and are a tremendously chefly thing to put on a plate), sitting in an ornamental pond of really dense, buttery Béarnaise, full of a tiny dice of clams and tomatoes. Venison loin, wrapped in a caul with a foie and black truffle farce, was bathed in London's densest jus. The tiny tower (why is it always towers?) of beetroot and pear was a joyous contrast to all this richness - but oh, so small. At this point I would have paid almost anything for a salad.

Another soup - this time a chestnut veloute with celery leaves, crisp little puffs of parmesan and a slice of white truffle. It's white truffle season at the moment, and the smell as the dishes approached was glorious. Some white truffle oil was drizzled into the dish - gorgeous, but I wish this buttery, sweet, creamy, nutty, truffly concoction had been served at the start of the meal, when my appetite for all this richness still had legs.

Coffee tart, peanut ice cream, a little disk of hazelnut meringue. "I wish there was some fruit," said Dr W. "The cream-tasting bit of my tongue doesn't work any more." Everyone at the table concurred heartily. (And the pastry in that tart was the single dud of the evening - cakey and rather solid.) We thought this was the end, but the food just kept on coming - a positive bucket full of salt caramels, most of which found their way into my Mum's handbag; fresh, hot, citrusy Madeleines; almond macarons with a fresh, creamy chocolate truffle centre. Finally, here were cones of gingerbread filled with liquorice ice cream, topped with a hard caramel shaped like, and flavoured with, star anise. This was the lightest, most digestible item we ate. So much so that I gave mine to Dr W to digest.

The (gargantuan) bill arrived sealed with a dollop of aubergine-coloured wax.

This is gorgeous, beautifully presented food, and it's so French I was fully expecting it to go on strike. But it's all a little too much at once - this is rich stuff in every sense of the word, and I wonder how it's going down during the credit crunch. I'd certainly expect a restaurant of this calibre to be far, far more busy on a night shortly before Christmas than it was when we visited. If you're set on visiting, try lunchtime, when a two-course menu comes in at £25, and a three-course one at £30.

Does anyone know where I can buy some aubergine shag-pile carpet?

Bouchon, Las Vegas

I have a sense that Thomas Keller, one of America's best chefs and a man with impeccable style and taste, doesn't really do the Vegas thing. Bouchon, his Las Vegas outpost, feels positively out of time and place in this very modern, very garish city. By hiding it in a little-travelled corner of the sprawling Venetian Casino Resort, he's successfully made it feel private, out-of-the-way and oddly genuine in a city full of fibreglass souks serving sushi. (It really is out-of-the-way, in a corner of the Venezia tower; from the car park you will need to take two separate elevators, and if you're approaching from the casino you will have to swallow your pride and ask for directions, because it's near-impossible to locate otherwise.)

Bouchon is a glorious Palladian room housing a Lyonnaise bistro (or 'bouchon'), all marble-topped tables, encaustic tiles, sweeping arched windows, a pewter bar and pristine white-aproned serving staff. The restaurant has won a number of awards, many for its breakfast, and made Anthony Bourdain spit with rage over the French fries (of all things), which he admitted were better than the ones he serves at Les Halles. It serves what is, for my money, absolutely the best breakfast you will find in the city - we made a point of walking the two and a half miles from Mandalay Bay each time we went in order to burn as many morning calories as possible before arriving.

Breakfast diners are given complimentary butter, jam and an epi of freshly baked bread. Bouchon's bakery has a giant reputation, and you're well advised to sample the pastries on offer at the top of the menu alongside the excellent bread. Pains au chocolat are a beautiful example - hundreds of impossibly fine layers of flaky croissant dough, beautifully crisp outside and meltingly tender within, coiled around a stick of bitter chocolate - just begging to be dipped in your coffee. Even that coffee is something special; Chef Keller has selected the blend of four beans from all over the world, and it's a beautiful, dark, chocolatey roast, fantastic with those pastries.

We used to live in Paris before we got married, and I haunted patisseries like Angelina, Laduree and Hédiard. I am utterly alarmed to find better pastries than were available in any of the famous Paris names in a place like Las Vegas. My favourite pastry was probably this cheese Danish - a cloud of sweetened cream cheese on the lightest, flakiest, melting-est Danish base I've ever encountered.

Breakfast entrées include Dr W's favourite, the Bouchon French Toast. This is prepared bread pudding style - a tower of hot, custardy brioche, studded with jewels of cooked apple, drizzled with maple syrup and garnished with thin, thin slices of raw apple. If held at gunpoint, I couldn't choose between the amazingly light and flavourful boudin blanc with beurre noisette and scrambled egg (the only quibble I had over a few meals at Bouchon - these eggs weren't among the best I've eaten, being rather dry and hard) and the croque madame, which oozes glorious bechamel and Gruyère. That croque madame comes with the pommes frites which made Tony Bourdain enter a deep depression, and they're very good indeed. They're dry, crisp, fluffy inside, and hard to stop eating. But for French fry perfection in Las Vegas I recommend that you visit Stripsteak, a Michael Mina restaurant at Mandalay Bay, where the trio of duck fat fries (always served as an amuse bouche, and also available as a side dish) - one pot with paprika dusting and a barbecue sauce, one with truffles and a truffle aïoli, and one with herbs and a home-made ketchup - are far and away the best I've ever eaten.

Bouchon always offers a few daily specials on the blackboard. Peekytoe crab hash with onion confit, a poached egg and hollandaise was, according to the lady at the next table, 'Perfect. Gorgeous.' Dr W's tomato, bacon and spinach omelette with sharp cheddar was a simple preparation presented brilliantly. And Keller's quiches are justifiably famous - tender, moist and delicious, with a brittle, short crust.

Service here was charming and unobtrusive. On each visit, our waiters were very happy to answer questions (even rather technical ones about the sourcing of ingredients), and refilled coffee and water unobtrusively.

As you've probably gathered by looking at the number of dishes mentioned above, we didn't feel much like eating breakfast anywhere else once we'd eaten our first Bouchon meal. Somehow, we didn't manage to make it to the restaurant for an evening meal - I'm leaving supper at Bouchon as a treat for our next visit to Vegas, which is probably my favourite city for eating in the world.

Bruno's Brasserie, Cambridge

Update, 19 February 2008
Sadly, Bruno's is closing after this weekend, doubtless to be replaced by yet another branch of Starbucks or Subway. Thanks to Dan for the tip.

Update, 10 July 2007
A thousand apologies to Dan from the River Farm Smokery in Bottisham, who is, in fact, responsible for the very lovely smoked tomatoes mentioned below - I mistook them for the restaurant's own. Dan - I am still having dreams about those pigeon breasts you guys provided for the beer festival. Keep up the good work!

Cambridge isn't exactly buckling under the weight of good restaurants. It's odd; Cambridge is an affluent city, and the university gives it a really cosmopolitan feel which just isn't reflected in its restaurants. We groan under the weight of a million branches of Pizza Express and chains like Café Rouge and Chez Gerard, largely thanks to the enormous property prices in the city, which mean that independent restaurants are hard-pressed to afford a pitch. There are still a few happy standouts (the place I live next door to, 12 miles outside the city, is one of them; email me if you want more details). Midsummer House, with its two Michelin Stars, is a very fine restaurant in the centre of the city, although if you, like me, are mildly annoyed rather than amused by some of the twiddles, froth and frills associated with molecular gastronomy, a visit can be a pain in the wallet you might prefer not to bear. Over in Little Shelford, Sycamore House (only open from Wednesday to Saturday) is excellent - I'll post a complete review later this year.

Bruno's Brasserie (52 Mill Road, Cambridge, CB1 2AS, Tel: 01223 312702) has been a Cambridge standard for good French bistro food for some years now. The restaurant used to have a Michelin star, and I'll admit to being a little hornswoggled by some of the aesthetic changes they've made since losing it; the food remains very good, but the linen tablecloths and napkins have gone (to be replaced by nothing at all and sad paper squares), and the restaurant has repositioned itself as a 'restaurant and gallery'. Cambridge happens to have some good galleries, especially along King's Parade (check out Primavera when you're in town for some really interesting paintings, jewellery, pottery, glass and sculpture). Bruno's is not a gallery. It's a restaurant which displays local painters' work, sometimes pretty weak, for sale to diners. Acres of canvas does not necessarily make up for the lack of a tablecloth, especially when the paintings are a bit...you know. Still - on to the food and the wine.

Linen and questionable paintings aside, I really like Bruno's. It's one of the few good restaurants I've found which can cater easily for large groups, and in the past I've been to events where friends have rented out half of the restaurant. Service was prompt and excellent even when there were thirty of us. This is good French food with some accents from other cuisines, so starters include this Salade Lyonnaise with a perfectly poached egg alongside more exotic dishes like the mussels in a lime and coriander broth.

The wine list is thoughtful and well-chosen, and there's also a good cocktail list. The restaurant was very helpful with the wine when my friend celebrated a big birthday there, and allowed the pair of us to prop ourselves up at an empty table and taste a selection from the list. Three 'palate cleansers' are also on offer between courses: a champagne and vanilla sorbet, a very lovely passionfruit and lavender sorbet and a watermelon and vodka granita. These will cost you an extra £1.50, but they're worth every penny.

Main courses are built around really excellent cuts of meat. On previous visits I've enjoyed the belly pork (which is almost always on the menu). This beef fillet was cooked exactly medium rare (often a difficult task, for some reason, in British kitchens, many of which seem to only specialise in differing shades of grey). It sat on a crisp and delicate rosti, and was topped with a fierce and very tasty Roquefort butter - sometimes the restaurant also offers a foie gras butter. Those tomatoes you can see were a lovely surprise; they were smoked in the restaurant kitchen and served cold (although one of our dining companions said he would have found them much better if they'd been hot, like the rest of the dish).

I felt like revisiting my 1980s childhood and ordered the strawberry and almond shortcake. This was served with basil leaves and a basil coulis (basil is a lovely herb with strawberries). The fragile, friable shortbread was delicately spiked with almonds, and the strawberries were cheeringly sweet given this summer of no sunshine we've been having. This reminds me - if the rain does stop any time soon, ask for a table outdoors on the lovely terrace.

If you visit Bruno's, parking on one of Mill Road's side streets or at the Queen Anne car park on Parkside is always available. The restaurant is popular, so you should be sure to make a reservation.

Foie gras

Lunch never managed to make itself a very complicated affair on our holiday in Provence. Enid Blyton used Famous Five propaganda to imbue my childhood with the notion that food eaten outdoors always tastes best, and I've still not quite got over the conviction that she's right. Happily, we were well equipped for outdoor eating, with a gorgeous terrace with parasols, two large tables and plenty of comfy chairs. Just down the hill was a shop specialising in foie gras. I think you can probably see where this is going.

The foie gras in the top picture is a mi-cuit bloc. This means the liver has been minced and seasoned, before being gently cooked. (I wasn't able to find a whole mi-cuit liver to show you, unfortunately.) Mi-cuit foie gras is a very different product from the foie gras you can buy in jars; it's cooked very briefly (unlike a jar, which will get a couple of hours' cooking time) and needs to be kept in the fridge and eaten quickly. Its texture is almost buttery, and the taste is sublime, and not in the least livery. Don't be put off by the cheaper bloc - it's often just as good as a whole liver, especially if you're lucky enough to find one made by one of France's many proud, small producers. Goose foie gras is more expensive than duck, but try both - you may, like me, find that you prefer the delicate flavour of the smaller duck liver. Try drinking a good dessert wine alongside the liver.

We ate this foie gras terrine at Bistrot Découverte in St Remy de Provence (mi-cuit again, made from small pieces of liver pressed in the restaurant's kitchen). It was served with a sourdough bread and a dried fruit compote. You can make out the duck's yellow fat and the fleur de sel that the chef seasoned the liver with.

When eating foie gras back at the house, we accompanied it with fresh fruit (figs and wetly ripe white peaches are fantastic with a good foie gras) and slices of toasted brioche. Be careful buying brioche for foie gras outside France - unaccountably, most of the brioche you can buy in the UK is packed with vanilla flavouring, which is just downright wrong with a delicately flavoured liver. I also enjoy foie gras with a good fruit jelly - a sharp crab apple or fragrant quince jelly work very well against the smooth creaminess of the liver.

My brother, who lives in Bordeaux, sent a foie gras to us last Christmas, accompanied by a jar of pink peppercorns (a berry, not a true pepper), which he insisted we try with the foie gras. I ground them up in my mortar and pestle and (as usual), he was right; they were brilliant with it. Pink peppercorns are hard to find in the UK outside those mixtures of white, green, black and pink pepper for transparent grinders, so I was delighted to discover a tree heavy with them in the garden we rented. We picked a few bunches and set to them with mortar and pestle. Delicious.

One-dish roast chicken, potatoes and accompaniments

Certain groceries were absurdly cheap in the markets we used in the Cote d'Azur. These two chickens, though, beautifully dressed and trimmed, with Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée labels and a lovely succulent plumpness, took the parsimonious biscuit. Each was large enough to serve four, and the special offer which gave me one free (in a lovely cardboard box) when I bought the other meant that the pair only cost €4. That's €4 for more protein than my cats get in a week.

I decided to roast the chickens like this for a number of reasons. I was on holiday, so wanted a dish that wasn't too fiddly, which meant I could spend some more time on the terrace drinking. They were good birds whose flavour deserved a chance to sing on its own. And this method meant that I could pile the dish high with Provençal flavours. I found some paste made from sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, capers and a very little anchovy, some roast red peppers marinated in olive oil and herbes de Provence, some nutty-tasting little new potatoes and other good things. To serve six with plenty left over, this is what I did with them :

2 chickens
5 tablespoons sundried tomato paste
8 salted anchovies
100g roast marinated red peppers, cut into strips
1kg new potatoes
750g shallots, peeled
6 bulbs (yes, whole bulbs) garlic
1 lemon
1 bottle rosé wine (I used the local Bandol, which was pretty much the only wine you could buy in the area)
150g butter
4 bay leaves
1 tablespoon herbes de Provençe
1 handful fresh chervil
1 handful fresh parsley
1 handful fresh basil
150g crème fraîche
Salt and pepper

Pull any fat out of the inside of the chickens and discard. Zest the lemons, putting the zest to one side. Chop the lemons in half and put one half in the cavity of each chicken with a bay leaf and a generous seasoning of salt and pepper.

Place the chickens in a large roasting dish, and fill the space around them with the potatoes, peeled, whole shallots, garlic bulbs (not peeled, and cut in half across the equator), the remaining bay leaves, the anchovies and peppers. The anchovies will 'melt' when cooked and will give a deeply savoury, but not fishy, base to the dish.

Place knobs of butter on the chickens, and scatter over the herbes de Provençe and some more salt. In a jug, whisk together the tomato paste, the lemon zest and the wine, and pour it all into the baking dish. Season and place in the oven at 180° C for two hours, basting frequently with the winey juices.

When the chickens come out of the oven, transfer them and the potatoes, shallots, garlic and peppers to a warm serving dish to rest. Chop the chervil, parsley and basil finely, and whisk them and the crème fraîche into the pan juices. Serve with a green salad and some more of the wine you used in the dish.

Pissaladiere - French onion tart

We're going to the Côte d'Azur later in September, where we've rented a big manor house with a gaggle of friends. I'm looking forward to the cooking - I've missed French market and supermarket produce since Dr Weasel and I left Paris to live in the UK again a few years ago.

I thought I'd cook some Provencale recipes before we leave, just so I feel properly prepared. There is nothing more Provencale than Pissaladiere.

Pissaladiere is a delicious, sharply savoury little tart made from crisp puff pastry, onions cooked until they are sweet and glossy, anchovies and olives. A traditional Pissaladiere would use a preserved fish paste called pissala rather than the anchovies. I did not have an empty Kilner jar and a few pounds of tiny salted fish, so this little tart employs some very delicious Provencale anchovies I found in Waitrose, marinaded in garlic and herbs.

To serve one person (double the recipe to serve two, but I shall be posting another tart for the other half of the puff pastry tomorrow which you might want to serve alongside this), you'll need:

3 onions
½ sheet puff pastry from the supermarket chiller cabinet
1 large knob butter
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
Anchovies to taste
15 olives (preserved in oil, not salt)
10 salted capers, rinsed

Slice the onions thinly and saute them in the butter over a low heat until they release their sugar and turn golden and sweet (about half an hour). Don't salt them; you'll get all the salt you need from the other toppings.

Use a sharp knife to cut the rectangle of pastry in half. Set one half aside for tomorrow's recipe. With the knife, score a line a centimetre from each edge of the pastry rectangle, so you end up with a smaller rectangle drawn inside it. The centimetre at the edges will be the puffy sides of the tart. Use a fork to make little holes in the inner rectangle. This will stop the part of the tart with the filling from rising.

Spread the soft, golden onions inside the inner rectangle. Lay the anchovies in a diamond pattern over them (you can slice them in half lengthways and use fewer for a less strong flavour; these particular anchovies were quite mild and mellow, so I left the fillets whole) and scatter over the thyme, capers and olives. I used a mixture of black, purple and green olives. Bake in a tray on a sheet of greaseproof paper at 200° C for 20-25 minutes, until the edges are golden and puffy, and the base is crisp.

This tart is delicious hot or cold. Try having one cold at a picnic, or making tiny Pissaladieres for a starter when you have a dinner party.

Cherry clafoutis

This clafoutis recipe is great at this time of year, when cherries are in the supermarkets in superabundance. The punnets are enormous, and several places are offering buy one get one free deals - shop around for your cherries and make sure those you buy are juicy, dark and handsome.

Clafoutis is a traditional dessert from the Limousin region of France, made with fresh fruit (usually cherries) and a thick batter. I've made this dish out of season using cherries preserved in kirsch. It's very delicious that way, but I can't help finding a clafoutis made with fresh cherries just that bit better. Don't bother stoning your cherries; they're a pig to stone (although there is a tool you can buy to help), and the juice from the stoned cherries leaks into the batter. Much better to have a whole cherry burst juicily in your mouth, then spit the stone out, than have it sit there damply, having leaked all its lovely juice pinkly into the rest of the dish.

Credit is due here to Mr Weasel. This is my recipe, but he cooked it because I was busy swearing at a wok full of boiling oil - of which more tomorrow.

To serve six, you'll need:

4 oz flour
3½ oz caster sugar
6 eggs
2 drops almond essence
½ pint milk
50 cherries (or enough to cover the bottom of your pan)

Preheat the oven to 210°C.

Grease your pan. I used a tarte tatin dish, which is about 10 inches in diameter. Put enough cherries in the bottom of the dish to cover it in a single layer.

Use an electric handwhisk to beat the sugar, almond essence and eggs together. Add the flour to the bowl and drizzle the milk into the mixture, whisking all the time until you have a smooth batter. Pour the batter over the cherries in the dish, and put it in the oven for 45 minutes.

When you remove the clafoutis from the oven, it will have puffed up, a bit like a souffle. Set it aside to subside for a couple of minutes, then dish it up. Serve with cream - and remember not to bite down on the stones.

French onion soup

A friend of mine is visiting New York for work at the moment. I received an anguished message from him about a French onion soup he experienced at the Crowne Plaza off Times Square. I quote him in full, because it made me laugh.

'The soup itself is quite nice, but is plugged by a solid lump of melted cheese that is about the diameter of a Camembert, and an inch think. We're talking essentially an entire Camembert's worth of American plastic cheese. I don't mind a delicate top to the bowl, but you could have taken this out, chilled it, and made plastic cheese sandwiches for a hungry family of six.'

Poor him. (I am keeping him anonymous so he doesn't get any death threats from Americans fond of plastic cheese.) French onion soup isn't really that hard to get right, but not many restaurants seem to bother trying; the very worst I've ever had was, shamefully, in Les Halles, the old market district in Paris. Les Halles is meant to be the birthplace of French onion soup, and Le Pied au Cochon is meant to be a restaurant which specialises in the stuff. Ha. It's rubbish. The stock's insipid, the rubbery onions haven't been left to caramelise, and there's no booze in sight. The cheesey bread lid is mostly bread, and the whole leaves you with the sort of hurt feeling you get when someone you trusted has stolen your teddy bear and sold it to buy drugs. Avoid.

The cheese you use here is important, but you do have a choice open to you. You can do it the Les Halles way and use Camembert on your giant crouton, which is delicious and, when stirred into the soup, makes it creamy and cheesey and gloopy and glorious.

I consider we've been overdoing the soft washed-rind French cheese thing recently (I have discovered a local source of Epoisse, and that Tartiflette the other week had enough Camembert in it to keep your arteries busy for a good six months). So I went the other way with our croutons, and topped them with sweet, stringy Gruyere (actually Swiss, but who's checking?). Gruyere has a special affinity for the sweetly Madeira-caramelised onions in this soup; try it instead of Camembert some time and see what you think.

To serve six as a starter or four as a main course, you'll need:

3lb onions, sliced
1 small wineglass Madeira
2½ pints good beef stock or good consommé
Open-textured white bread (ciabatta or a French loaf) - 2 slices per person
1 slice Gruyere per piece of bread
3oz butter
Salt and pepper

Put the onions in a large, heavy saucepan with the butter, and simmer, stirring every twenty minutes or so, for longer than you think you should. You're aiming to cook these to a golden, caramel unctuousness. I didn't use a kitchen timer; I put the DVD of Ziegfeld Girl on and sang along with Judy, running to the kitchen occasionally to stir, until Lana Turner did her tragic thing with the stairs and the chaise longue at the end. (Those who are not Judy Garland fans can just set their timers for 132 minutes, but you're missing a treat.) The onions will have cooked down to a fraction of their original volume.

When your onions are done and you have spent a quiet five minutes being surprised at how Hedy Lamarr was able to look fantastic walking down stairs with fruit on her head and invent spread-spectrum communications without turning a hair, throw the Marsala into the hot pan with the onions and let it simmer away to nothing. Add the stock or consommé, turn the heat right down and bring slowly to a simmer again.

While the soup is coming up to temperature, prepare the croutons. Toast thick slices of bread (I used a grill pan to get good dark, charred lines on each slice), lay the cheese on them and put them under the grill until the cheese starts to brown.

Serve the soup with a crouton floating on top. The soup should soak into the crisp crouton, its heat softening the cheese. Slurp the lot quickly while it's still deliciously hot.

Tartiflette

Please do not serve this to people on diets.

Tartiflette is a dish from the Savoy region of France, where they take their dairy products very, very seriously. Despite its extreme good looks and fantastic taste, it's not actually a traditional recipe - it was invented in the 1980s by the union of Reblochon cheesemakers as a way to popularise the cheese. Since then, it's become popular throughout the region, and different recipes have proliferated. This is my take on it.

At heart, and as the Reblochon cheesemakers intended, this is an absurdly creamy potato gratin with a whole cheese sitting on top of it. The nutmeg and thyme in here make the cheese sing, the rich Marsala makes the cream a velvety thing of beauty, and the sweet shallots and salty, smoked bacon infuse the whole dish. Serve with a salad and some crusty bread. (The salad is there so you can pretend you're eating healthily.)

Reblochon is hard to come by here, so I have used a Camembert. You can use any soft, washed-rinded, reasonably stinky cheese (an Epoisse would work equally well). To serve two for supper, with enough for lunch tomorrow, you'll need:

8 potatoes (I used Vivaldi, which are firm and creamy when cooked)
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 pint crème fraîche
12 rashers smoked streaky bacon
6 shallots
½ wine glass Marsala
1 Camembert
3 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
Butter
Nutmeg
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 200°C.

Chop the shallots into small dice, and cut the bacon into dice the same size. Saute in a little butter until the shallots are sweet and the bacon browning at the edges. Set aside. Peel the potatoes and slice them as thin as you can. (My new mandoline has made this the work of a couple of minutes, and I'm yet to injure myself on it, so I'm still recommending you go straight to the cookware shop and buy one. A plastic Japanese one is very inexpensive - mine was £5 - and works splendidly.) Arrange one overlapping layer of potato slices in the bottom of a heavy baking dish which you have buttered generously, then sprinkle over the thyme, a grating of nutmeg and half of the crushed garlic. Scatter over half of the bacon and shallot mixture, then spread half the crème fraîche over the top. Repeat with another layer, then put a final potato lid on the top.

Slice the cheese in half along its equator, and cut each half into quarters. Arrange the pieces on top of the dish. Pour the Marsala over the dish, dot with butter, season (don't use too much salt - you'll get plenty from the bacon and the salty cheese) and bake in the hot oven for an hour, or a little longer - test to make sure that the potatoes are tender. It's advisable to put a tray under the dish to catch any drips.

This is very rich. Make sure your salad has a tart dressing to offset the extreme creaminess of it all, and dig in.

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.

Smoked mackerel gratin

At work, my lunchtimes are regularly spent gossiping with friends over a pub baked potato. There is nothing wrong with baked potatoes; indeed, a baked potato can be a thing of wonder (something I hope to demonstrate in the coming weeks). The pub baked potato, however, is a sad, microwaved thing, whose cheese has been melted under heat-lamps as it waits to be served. More often than not, this means that the salad which has been shoved on the side of the plate is melting too.

Salads shouldn't melt.

So. It's time to rehabilitate the potato.

I love gratins; especially at this time of the year, when it's getting cold, there is nothing nicer than lovely, starchy potato which has absorbed its own weight in scented milk and cream. You can make a whole meal of a gratin by adding extras - I had some smoked mackerel from Spinks in the fridge. A mackerel gratin is just the thing to start me feeling good about potatoes again.

I start out by infusing 240ml of milk with some thyme, a bay leaf and some parsley from the garden. This is a great application for the woody flowering tops of the parsley I can't use to garnish (and which I should remove to make the leafy part of the plant more bushy). They're very fragrant, and are perfect for this. I also add some celery leaves from the centre of a bundle in the fridge, a crushed clove of garlic, a clove, three peppercorns, a quartered shallot and some salt. The milk comes to a simmer and is taken off the heat while I slice the potatoes.

It's important to slice the potatoes very thin. I wish I had a mandoline - a device to slice vegetables very evenly, and very thin. I make a mental note to go to the kitchen shop soon.

Slicing the potatoes thinly increases the surface area that'll be exposed to the wet ingredients, and so increases the starchyness of your finished gratin (your sauce will be thicker); it'll also result in a crisper finish. I layer them in a thick-bottomed, enamel dish, which has been buttered to within an inch of its life. One fillet of smoked mackerel goes on top of this, flaked, and then a final layer of potato goes on top.

I strain the infused milk through a sieve, then add 350ml of double cream to the herbs and spices that are left in the sieve, and simmer that on the stove too. The potatoes, fish and fragrant milk are covered with tin foil and put in an oven preheated to 220c. (Yes, I know I have sloshed milk all over the counter. And everything looks strangely glaucous because the light in my kitchen is atrocious and I have to use the flash.)

The house begins to smell very, very good.

Once the cream has come to a simmer, I remove it from the heat, and strain it into a jug with a tablespoon of grainy Dijon mustard. Twenty minutes later, most of the milk has been absorbed into the potatoes. I pour over the cream, sprinkle a little finely grated parmesan over the top, dot with butter and return the dish to the oven, without the tin foil. (I love my Microplane grater; I spent years sweating over grating solid chunks of parmesan, but I got a Microplane after I saw one being used in an Italian restaurant and asked what it was. It also does a beautiful job of pulping garlic and ginger.) I'm careful not to add too much parmesan; it's there to flavour, not smother.

The gratin sits in the oven for another 25 minutes. When it comes out it is crisp and golden, and the creamy sauce is bubbling gently between the slices; the underside is golden too, and there is a soft, smoky layer of unctuous, creamy potato and mackerel in the middle.

This is how autumn food is meant to be.

Thankfully, I do not own a heat lamp, so the (bagged) salad is crisp and does not go wet and stinky on me.

Those particularly interested in the lore of the gratin, and the reasons for the wonderful, lactic taste that all of this messing around with potatoes and cream produces, should go directly to Amazon and buy everything Jeffrey Steingarten has ever written. This will not only inform you in wonderful, systematising detail about the miracle that occurs in your gratin dish, but will keep you implausibly happy in the bath for as long as it takes you to read it all, and then for the half hour (turn the hot tap on at this point; things will be getting a little clammy) it takes you to bemoan the fact that there isn't a third volume.