Cochinita pibil

This red-cooked Mexican pork is marinated in an acidic dressing, then cooked slowly for hours, with meltingly tender results. It's a traditional recipe from Yucatan, where pork would be marinaded in the bitter local orange juice with achiote paste, then wrapped in banana leaves and buried in a fire pit for hours (pibil is Mayan for buried). Those of you without a handy banana tree and fire pit can make it in the oven in a dish sealed tightly with tinfoil - banana leaves, although very decorative, don't really add any flavour, so you're not really losing out here. The juice of bitter oranges can be approximated with a bit of vinegar and some lemon juice blended with sweet orange juice.

Unfortunately, while you can do clever conjuring tricks with your lemons, vinegar and tinfoil, there's not really anything you can substitute for the achiote paste in this recipe. Achiote is what gives this dish its lovely red colour. It's a made from crushed annatto seeds - in the UK you can sometimes find achiote powder (Barts make it and it's stocked in the spices section in some supermarkets), but the paste is far preferable. The Cool Chile Company, Mexgrocer and Casa Mexico are good UK suppliers of Mexican ingredients, and will mail you some paste.

To serve four, you'll need:

825g fat pork shoulder
3 tablespoons achiote paste
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1½ teaspoons each fennel, coriander and cumin seeds, ground in the pestle and mortar
½ teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1 crumbled bay leaf
1 teaspoon oregano
10 cloves garlic, crushed or grated
Juice of 2 oranges
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
2 pointy peppers
1 large onion
1 tablespoon salt

Start by chopping the pork into chunks about 3 inches square. Don't trim the fat away - it will moisten the meat as it cooks. Put the pork in a large bowl with the herbs, spices, juices, vinegar, salt and garlic, stir well to blend all the ingredients and marinate overnight.

When you come to cook the pork, chop the onion into large chunks and brown the chunks in a dry frying pan. Chop the peppers into long strips. Spread the pork and its marinade evenly in a shallow dish, layer the onion and peppers on top, and cover tightly with a couple of pieces of tinfoil, making sure you make a good seal all around the edge of the dish. Roast on a low rack in the oven at 150°C (300°F) for three hours.

When the cooking time is up, unwrap the dish and leave to rest for ten minutes. Serve on tortillas (corn tortillas are great if you can find them - again, they're sometimes hard to find in the UK) with guacamole, a good dollop of sour cream or crème fraîche (crème fraîche is closer to the crema you'd eat in Mexico), some fresh coriander and Mexican pickled onions. Those onions are the gorgeous pink things in the picture at the top, and they're a traditional accompaniment for this dish - I'll put up a recipe for them later in the week.

Malaysian curried lamb shoulder

I'm cheating a bit here. The flavours are bang-on Malaysian, but you'd be unlikely to find a shoulder joint cooked in this way in Malaysia proper, where bite-sized pieces of meat are the norm in this kind of a curry. I decided to cook half a lamb shoulder on the bone in this curry sauce to maximise the flavour by keeping the meat near the bone - and because I love the fall-off-the-bone texture that a fatty shoulder achieves after a couple of hours slow cooking.

What makes a curry definably Malaysian? A few things - the spicing will be rather different from Indian curries, making use of more eastern aromatics like lemongrass, coriander, star anise and ginger. The liquid in the curry will probably be coconut milk, rather than yoghurt or any other dairy product.

I've made my own curry paste here, but if you don't have the time or the inclination, you should be able to find good Malaysian curry powders and pastes on sale in any Chinese supermarket. I particularly like Yeo's curry powder. This will make more paste than you need, but it keeps well in the fridge for a few weeks if you put it in a jar and pour over some oil to stop the air getting to the paste.

To serve two greedy people, you'll need:

Curry paste
4 tablespoons coriander seeds
2 tablespoons cumin seeds
12 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
2 star anise flowers
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
3 stalks lemongrass
1 peeled piece galangal, about the length of your thumb (substitute with extra ginger if you can't find any)
1 peeled piece ginger, about the length of your thumb
3 fresh birds-eye chillies (cili padi in Malay - cut down here if you want to reduce the heat)
10 dried chillies (you can find sun-dried cili kering, a less fearsome chilli than cili padi, in some Chinese supermarkets - otherwise, use what you can find)
1 teaspoon turmeric powder or 1 grated fresh turmeric root
1 bulb garlic

Lamb and sauce
½ shoulder of lamb, on the bone
2 large onions
1 can coconut milk
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 handful coriander leaves
Salt
Flavourless oil for frying

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Begin by heating a couple of teaspoons of oil in a heavy pan with a lid, large enough to fit the lamb in snugly. The pan should be able to fit inside your oven. When the oil is very hot, sear the lamb on all sides, and remove it to a plate.

Chop the onions finely and fry them with two tablespoons of the curry paste in the same oil you seared the lamb in. Add a little more oil if necessary. Fry, stirring all the time, until the onions are translucent and soft (about eight minutes).

Return the meat to the pan with any juices it has released onto its plate. Pour over the coconut milk, add the salt and the soy sauce, and bring the whole confection to a gentle simmer. Put the lid on and put the pan in the oven for 2 hours, turning the meat occasionally.

Taste the sauce when the cooking time is finished - you may find you want to add a spot of sugar or a squeeze of lemon juice. Skim off any fat that's floating on top of the sauce. Peel the skin off the lamb and discard. Sprinkle over the fresh coriander leaves and serve with rice. I like a salad of fresh pineapple and cucumber with this.

Soy and anise braised pork

I know a lot of you come here for the Chinese and Malaysian recipes, and it hit me last week that I've not produced anything new in that line for a couple of months. This soy and anise pork has been worth the wait, though - here, belly pork is braised in a deeply fragrant and savoury sauce until it's so tender that it positively melts in the mouth.

Star anise is a beautiful, flower-shaped spice from a Chinese evergreen; it's an entirely different species of plant from European anise, although it has a similar flavour. It's one of the aromatics used in five-spice powder, and has a warm, intensely fragrant taste. There's been something of a shortage of the spice in recent years because an acid found in star anise is used in making Tamiflu, the anti-influenza drug. Happily for the cooks among you (and those with flu), drugs companies have since started to synthesise shikimic acid, so star anise is back on the shelves again. The Chinese use it as an indigestion remedy - you can try it yourself by releasing a seed from the woody star and chewing it after a meal if you feel you've overindulged.

This recipe capitalises on the affinity star anise has for rich meats like pork. Belly pork is one of my favourite cuts of meat (you can find some more recipes for belly pork here) - it's flavourful, has brilliant texture, and the fat gives it a wonderful unctuous quality as it bastes itself from within. To serve four with rice and a stir-fried vegetable, you'll need:

1 kg pork belly
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon five-spice powder
2 tablespoons lard or flavourless oil
5 cloves garlic
6 shallots
4 flowers of star anise
2 tablespoons soft brown sugar
4 tablespoons dark soy sauce
2 teaspoons salt
250 ml pork or chicken stock

Using a very sharp knife or a Chinese cleaver, chop the pork into strips about 1.5 cm thick. (Do not remove the skin, which will become deliciously melting when cooked.) Mix one tablespoon of the soy sauce with the honey and five-spice powder in a bowl, and marinade the sliced pork in the mixture for an hour.

Chop the garlic and shallots very finely. Heat the lard to a high temperature in a thick-bottomed pan with a close-fitting lid, and fry the garlic, shallots, star anise and brown sugar together until they begin to turn gold. Turn the heat down to medium, add the pork to the pan with its marinade, and fry until the meat is coloured on all sides.

Pour over the chicken stock, and add the salt and the rest of the soy sauce. Bring the mixture to the boil, reduce to a gentle simmer, cover and continue to simmer for two hours, turning the meat every now and then. If the sauce seems to be reducing and thickening, add a little water.

This is one of those recipes which is even better left to cool, refrigerated, and then reheated the next day.

Devilled chicken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honey and sesame glazed chicken wings

Continuing this week's things which taste as if they ought to cost a lot more than they did theme, here's a recipe for chicken wings. They're a much-overlooked bit of the bird, and this is a shame (or would be if it didn't mean that they're amazingly cheap), because they're wonderfully tasty. Meat from near the bone of a chicken always tastes richer and sweeter. Grilled in a sweet sauce, the skin on the wings becomes crisp and delicious. And somehow, sticky things which demand to be eaten with the fingers are about three times tastier than the ones you can just manage with a knife and fork.

To serve four as a starter or two as a main course with rice, you'll need:

16 chicken wings
2 tablespoons dark soya sauce
2 tablespoons runny honey
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon light soya sauce
1 tablespoon chilli sauce (choose something sweet here - I used Kampong Koh chilli and garlic sauce, which is made in my grandparents' town in Malaysia)
3 cloves of garlic, crushed or grated with a Microplane grater
Juice of half a lemon

Remove the pointy end-joint from each wing with a sharp knife. Mix all the other ingredients in a large bowl and marinade the chicken pieces for a few hours or (preferably) overnight.

Place the chicken wings on a rack over some tin foil in a grill pan and grill close to the heat source under a medium flame for about six minutes on each side (or use a barbecue). Baste the chicken with the marinade from the bowl regularly as it cooks. The sauce will caramelise and the skin will bubble. If you want a sauce, put any extra marinade in a small pan and boil vigorously for a couple of minutes, then pour over the wings. Serve with a bowl on the table for the bones and plenty of paper napkins - you're going to get very sticky fingers!

Normandy roast belly pork

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

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

To serve four, you'll need:

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

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

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

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

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

Chicken with cardamom and preserved lemons

Remember those Moroccan preserved lemons from a few months back? They turned out very nicely indeed - salty, zingy skins infused with the scents of the spices in the jar. One of the spices I used in the preserved lemons was cardamom, and I've used more in this dish; along with the lemons and some flowery olive oil, it lifts and brightens the flavour of this chicken dish. Pure sunshine in a bowl - and that's just what I feel like in dismal October. Be sure when choosing your ingredients that you use an olive oil with a good flavour.

I've used a box of the tiny fillets (sometimes called chicken tenders) you'll find to one side of a chicken breast here. They're a very easy piece of meat to work with if you're in a hurry - no skinning or chopping necessary. To serve two, you'll need:

450g chicken fillet pieces
3 shallots
3 tablespoons polenta or cornmeal
8 cardamom pods
1 preserved lemon
4 tablespoons good extra-virgin olive oil
1 handful parsley, chopped
Salt and pepper

Start by scraping the pulp out of the inside of the preserved lemon (the pulp of these is too salty to eat). Dice the skin and pour over three tablespoons of the olive oil, then set aside while you prepare the rest of the meal.

Slice the shallots very finely and put them in a large bowl with the chicken. Bash the cardamom pods lightly in a mortar and pestle to crack their tough skins, then use the back of a teaspoon or a fingernail to get all the seeds out. Discard the empty pods and crush the seeds in the mortar and pestle. Mix the cardamom seeds, polenta and some salt and pepper, then sprinkle evenly over the chicken and shallots and mix well.

Heat the remaining tablespoon of olive oil in a large sauté pan over a high flame. Tip in all the chicken mixture and sauté until crisp and brown. Remove the chicken and crispy shallots to a clean bowl and pour over the lemon and oil mixture and some parsley, tossing like a salad to mix. Serve immediately.

Tarragon cream chicken

This recipe is absurdly quick and simple - it's good for unexpected guests because you're likely to have most of the ingredients in the house already (and may well already find them all lurking in your fridge). It's rich and delicious, and it only needs a salad and some crusty bread to accompany it and soak up the creamy juices.

If you can get your hands on some fresh tarragon, use that. Dried tarragon, however, is surprisingly good here. There are no similar short-cuts you can take with the parsley, though; dried parsley is useless and revolting, so you'll have to find some fresh.

To serve three, you'll need:

Three chicken breast fillets
3 tablespoons flour
400ml crème fraîche
3 tablespoons chopped fresh tarragon (or 3 teaspoons dried)
3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
Half a lemon
2 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper

Chop the chicken breasts into bite-sized pieces and dust them with the flour and a little salt and pepper. Melt the butter in a sauté pan and heat it until it starts to bubble. Add the chicken to the pan and sauté until it is cooked through and starting to brown at the edges. Turn the heat down low.

Tip the crème fraîche, herbs and mustard into the pan and stir well. Bring up to a simmer and add the lemon juice and some salt and pepper. Taste for seasoning, adding a little more lemon juice if you like, and serve immediately.

Crispy Chinese roast pork

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chicken satay

When we visit family in Malaysia, we usually make a beeline to the nearest hawker stall and gorge ourselves on satay - sticks of marinated meat, grilled over charcoal and served with a peanut sauce. The very best I've ever had was in Ipoh, an old tin-mining town, where an old satay man (so old he was already working there on my Dad's arrival in Malaysia aged seven - on seeing Dad, now bald and surrounded by his grown-up children, he still calls him China Boy) still makes satay on Jalan Bandar Timeh.

This is one of a few recipes which I love so much that I can be found back home, umbrella in one hand, hunched over a flickering barbecue in the very worst of weather. Sometimes an urge for satay will hit and there's really not much I can do about it; it's drive the hundred miles to Oriental City or make some at home.

For just this eventuality, there was a pot of palm sugar, fresh turmeric roots and lots of fresh lemongrass in the fridge. You really do need the fresh lemongrass (which you should be able to find at the supermarket), but if you're stuck miles from an Oriental grocer, you can substitute a mixture of molasses and soft brown sugar for the palm sugar, and use ground, dried turmeric instead of the roots.

Some Chinese Malaysian satay vendors will put a small piece of fat pork in-between each piece of lean meat to add flavour and moisture. This is quite incredibly delicious. If you can find a strip of pork fat (I wish I could), just snip it into small pieces and marinade it with the meat, then construct the sticks with alternate bits of fat and lean meat.

To make about a kilo of satay you'll need:

Marinade
Juice of 2 limes
1 teaspoon chilli powder
3 cloves garlic, crushed
2 turmeric roots (about the size of the top two joints of a woman's little finger), grated
2 inches from the fat end of a lemongrass stalk, grated
1 tablespoon peanut oil
4 tablespoons palm sugar
8 tablespoons light soy sauce (I used Kikkoman)
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Meat
1kg chicken, lamb or pork (I used chicken)

Satay sauce
2 tablespoons peanut oil
4 shallots, chopped very finely
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
3 turmeric roots, grated
½ teaspoon ground chilli
2 teaspoons freshly ground coriander seeds
2 inches grated lemongrass
3 tablespoons smooth peanut butter
1 can coconut milk (preferably without emulsifiers)
1 teaspoon salt

Chop the meat into bite-sized pieces and leave in a bowl with all the marinade ingredients for two hours. (This is a very penetrating marinade and you may find the flavour too strong if you leave it for longer.) Reserve the marinade and thread the meat on bamboo skewers.

Make the sauce by frying the shallots, garlic, chilli, turmeric and coriander in oil until the shallots are soft and translucent. Add the peanut butter, salt and coconut milk along with six tablespoons of the reserved marinade and simmer hard for five minutes. Turn the heat down to a gentle simmer and cook for another fifteen minutes (get someone else to watch it and stir every few minutes to stop the sauce catching) while you go outside and grill the meat.

Take another lemongrass stick, cut off the bottom half centimetre and then bang the end of the stick hard with something heavy. The end of the stick will resemble a brush. You can use this to baste the chicken on the barbecue with some of the remaining marinade. Keep cooking until the chicken is shiny and starting to caramelise at the edges. (In Malaysia you are likely to see satay makers fanning the charcoal on their little grill to make it hotter. I find a large, well-ventilated barbecue with plenty of charcoal is usually hot enough.)

When the chicken is done, serve it immediately with the hot satay sauce. In Malaysia you'd eat this with ketupat (compressed squares of rice), chunks of raw shallot and of cucumber, all of which are dipped in the sauce. We ate it with grilled sweetcorn, smacked cucumber which I made with more palm sugar, and a bowl of white rice with some of the sauce thrown over it - delicious.

Chicken pieces roasted in homemade barbecue sauce

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

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

To serve four, you'll need:

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

Preheat the oven to 200° C (400° F).

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

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

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

Hearty Chinese meatball soup

This is one of those recipes which feels really, really good for you. A clear chicken stock, flavoured with ginger, rice wine, spring onions and garlic, forms the base for this lovely soup. Meatballs still crisp from frying float in it, deliciously light in texture with their little cubes of water chestnut. Fresh, barely cooked slivers of baby vegetables give the whole dish a lovely sweetness.

If you made the chicken rice on this site, you may have kept some of the leftover broth in the freezer. If your freezer is innocent of chicken broth, you can make some from scratch using:

3 pints water
1 lb chicken wings (usually very cheap from the butcher)
1 inch piece of ginger, whacked with the flat of a knife to squash it a bit
5 cloves of garlic, crushed slightly with the flat of a knife
5 spring onions, tied together in a knot
2 tablespoons light soya sauce
1 wine glass of Chinese rice wine
1 chicken stock cube

Just bring all the ingredients to the boil in a large pan, reduce to a simmer and cook, skimming any froth of the top occasionally, for 30 minutes. Strain the solid ingredients out and discard. The broth can now be used or frozen. (These amounts will make enough for you to use half now for this soup, and freeze half to use later.)

To make the meatballs and finish the soup you'll need:

1 lb pork mince
1 egg
5 spring onions
5 cloves of garlic
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger
2 tablespoons dark soya sauce
1 tablespoon light soya sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 red chilli
Seasoned flour
1 small can water chestnuts
1 small handful each of baby carrots, mange tout peas and baby sweetcorn

Cut the spring onions, garlic, ginger, chilli and water chestnuts into small dice and combine with the pork, soya sauces, sesame oil and egg in a large bowl. Use your hands to form the mixture into meatballs about an inch across, and roll them in the seasoned flour.

Slice the vegetables into matchsticks. Saute the meatballs in a small amount of vegetable oil while you bring 1½ pints of the broth to a gentle simmer. When the meatballs are cooked and the broth is bubbling gently, drop the vegetables into the broth and immediately turn the heat off. Fill bowls with the vegetable-filled broth and place meatballs in each bowl. Garnish with sliced spring onion and eat immediately.

These meatballs are also fantastic just served with rice and a little soya sauce with raw chillies diced into it to dip.

Kofta kebab

We fancied lamb for Easter, but didn't feel like a roast. The answer came with the weather forecast; it was a gloriously sunny weekend, so I hauled the barbecue out for its first kebab recipe of the year.

This juicy, spicy kebab, also called a kofte kebab, is great served with a selection of mezze-type spreads, salad and pitta bread. I made hummus and tzatziki (just a tub of yoghurt with a generous handful of chopped mint and very finely chopped raw garlic), and a big bowl of aubergine caviar. Cooked over charcoal, the kebabs are deliciously smoky, but if the weather isn't up to it you can cook them under the grill.

To make about eight kebabs you'll need:

500g good-quality lamb mince
2 medium onions
4 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon coriander seeds
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 large handful fresh parsley
1 small handful fresh mint
1 large egg
Salt and pepper

Grind the cumin and coriander roughly in a mortar and pestle with a teaspoon of salt. Put the spices, herbs, onions, garlic and the egg in a food processor and blitz until everything is chopped. Add the meat and blitz again until everything is well-mixed. (Don't completely purée the meat - aim for a reasonably rough texture.)

Form handfuls of the meat mixture around bamboo skewers. (The skewers make the kebabs really easy to turn and move around on the grill, as well as holding things together.) Grill on a hot barbecue or under the kitchen grill for about ten minutes, turning regularly. Serve immediately.

Pulled pork

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

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

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

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

To serve about six people you'll need:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slow-roast citrus lamb shoulder with pilaf and accompaniments

I hate this time of year. The weather's glum, it gets dark absurdly early, and waking up to a foggy view over very damp fenland full of dead things does not make me leap out of bed springheeled with happiness. It's time for some summery spicing before I am driven to emigrate.

I've written about how brilliant slow-roast lamb shoulder is before - the meat becomes falling-apart-tender, all the fat renders out, and the skin becomes crisp and delicious. In this recipe, you'll push tiny pieces of lemon zest and garlic into pockets in the fatty flesh before cooking, infusing the whole joint with sunny flavour. I accompanied the lamb with hummus (I blogged the very simple recipe last year), an idiot-proof tzatziki (no recipe needed here - I just stirred a handful of chopped mint into a tub of Greek yoghurt with a little crushed garlic and some pepper), roast pointy peppers and a spicy pilaf. This makes a fantastic supper dish if you have guests, as the hummus, tzatziki and peppers can be prepared well in advance. The lamb needs very little attention for the four hours it's in the oven, and the pilaf is all cooked quickly, in one pan. To serve six, you'll need:

Lamb
1 lamb shoulder
Zest of 1 lemon, pared into strips
1 large bunch rosemary
5 cloves garlic, cut in half lengthwise
Salt

Using a very sharp small knife, make little pockets in the lamb shoulder just large enough for half a clove of garlic. Push a piece of garlic and a strip of lemon zest into pockets all over the joint. Lay the shoulder in a roasting tin on a bed of rosemary, skin side up. Sprinkle the skin with salt and place in an oven at 220° C for 20 minutes, then turn the heat down to 170° C and roast for four hours.

Pilaf
1¾ lb basmati rice
4 pints chicken stock
6 large shallots
2 tablespoons butter
5 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
2 teaspoons coriander seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon Ras-al-Hanout
2 teaspoons harissa
1 large pinch saffron, steeped in an eggcup of boiling water for 20 minutes
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 handful sultanas
Salt and pepper
1 handful chopped fresh coriander

Slice the shallots finely and sauté them in the butter in a large pan with a lid until starting to brown. Add the chopped garlic and all the spices except the saffron and harissa, and continue to fry for four minutes. Add the sugar and vinegar to the pan and simmer for two minutes until the mixture looks syrupy. Add the rice, stirring well to make sure it is well coated, with the sultanas, salt and saffron. Pour over the stock and bring to a fast boil, then immediately turn the heat down, put the lid on and simmer gently for 12 minutes. Stir the coriander and pepper through the finished rice.

Peppers
Slice sweet red peppers in half lengthways (use pointed peppers if you can find them - they're sweeter than bell peppers) and place an anchovy fillet and sliced clove of garlic in each half. Drizzle with olive oil, place a knob of butter in each pepper half, and put in the oven alongside the lamb for the last hour of cooking. These peppers taste their very best at room temperature, so take them out at the same time you take the lamb out, and leave them to cool as the lamb rests while you prepare the pilaf. The lamb will keep its heat as it rests, but if you place the peppers on a cold plate they'll be the perfect temperature when it's time to eat.

Chicken claypot rice

I bit the bullet last weekend and bought a claypot from the Chinese supermarket. These traditional cooking pots are finickity beasts to cook with; a claypot isn't shatter resistant, so you have to be very, very careful when cooking with it to allow it to heat up very slowly (complete with cold ingredients) and cool down equally slowly, or risk shards of pot and sauce all over the kitchen. Cooking in a claypot gives the dish a very particular texture and a smoky flavour. The rice on the very bottom of the pot will catch and singe into a gorgeous crisp layer, and the meat at the top will steam delicately, giving its juices to the flavourful rice.

I've used Chinese sausages here - you will be able to find them at any Chinese supermarket. If you can't get your hands on any, use lardons of smoked bacon instead. They won't taste the same, but they'll give the dish the smoky, porky depth you're looking for.

If you don't have access to a claypot, you can cook this dish in a heavy-bottomed (not non-stick) saucepan with a lid. A well-used claypot, however, will give a lovely smoky taste to whatever's cooked in it.

To serve three hungry people or four less-hungry people, you'll need:

3 Chinese sausages
4 chicken thighs
2 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tbsp dark soy
1 tbsp light soy
2 fat garlic cloves, crushed
5 chopped spring onions
1 tsp cornflour
½ glass rice wine
1 inch julienned ginger
1 tablespoon brown sugar
4 baby pak choi
5 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked in boiling water for 20 minutes
2 cups rice
3 cups stock

Mix the chicken and sausages in a bowl with all the ingredients except the rice, pak choi, mushrooms and stock. Leave to marinade for at least half an hour.

Put the rice and chicken stock in the cold claypot and place it over a medium heat with the lid on. Bring to the boil and immediately reduce the heat to a low simmer, then leave the rice to steam for 15 minutes. The rice should be nearly cooked, with little holes in the flat surface.

Spread the chicken mixture, the pak choi and the chopped mushrooms all over the top of the rice, and put the lid back on. Continue to steam over a low heat for another 15 minutes, until the chicken is white and cooked through. Serve piping hot.

Char siu bao - Chinese steamed pork buns

Char siu (see my recipe from last week) on its own is wonderful stuff. Chopped, cooked into a sticky, savoury, meaty mixture and sealed inside a light steamed bun, it becomes something really, really special. It's a dim sum staple; a filling, moreish little bun of scrumptiousness.

When we're in Malaysia, my very favourite breakfast is one of these buns. It makes a splendidly fattening change from muesli. Once you have a strip of char siu in the house, the buns are very simple to assemble. They're also a doddle to reheat - just steam for ten minutes - and they freeze like a dream.

If you made the braised pork with accompanying buns, you'll recognise the dough recipe here. The method is slightly different, in that you'll be stuffing your buns before steaming. To make about twenty buns you'll need:

Filling
1 fillet of char siu (about 10 oz)
2 tablespoons lard
4 fat cloves garlic, chopped finely
1 medium onion, cut into small dice
5 teaspoons caster sugar
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 teaspoon dark soya sauce
2 teaspoons light soya sauce
4 fl oz water
1 tablespoon plain flour
2 tablespoons vegetable oil

Buns
1 pack instant yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons lukewarm water
½ tablespoon salt
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
8 tablespoons sugar
8 fl oz lukewarm water
20 oz white flour

Filling method
Cut the char siu strip into tiny cubes with a knife and fork, and blend the vegetable oil and flour in a cup. Fry the garlic in the lard until it starts to turn colour, add the onions and cook until they are translucent. Pour in the sugar, sesame oil, soya sauces and water and bring up to a simmer. Add the chopped meat, stir until well-coated, then add the oil and flour. Continue to simmer for 30 seconds, then transfer to a bowl and chill.

Buns method
Mix the yeast, 1 teaspoon of sugar, two tablespoons of lukewarm water, half a tablespoon of salt and three tablespoons of vegetable oil in a teacup, and let it stand for five minutes.

Place the flour in a bowl and pour the yeast mixture into a depression in the centre of the flour. Add 8 tablespoons of castor sugar and 8 fl oz lukewarm water to the mixture and stir the flour with your hand until everything is brought together.

At this point the dough will be very sticky. Don't worry - just knead for ten minutes or so, and it will turn smooth and glossy. Don't add extra flour to get rid of the stickiness. The action of kneading will make the protein strands in the dough develop, and the stickiness will vanish on its own. You'll know that your dough is ready when it has become smooth, and does not stick to the bowl. Cover the bowl with cling film and leave in a warm place until the dough has doubled in size.

Knock the dough down again, and take an egg-sized piece in the palm of your left hand. Stretch it and squash it on your palm until you have a disc about the size of your hand. Still holding the disc of dough, put a teaspoon and a half of the chilled filling in the centre of the disc, then gather the edges to the centre and pinch closed. Put the pinched side of the bun on a square of greaseproof paper. Leave the filled buns in a warm place until doubled in size.

Steam the buns over boiling water for ten minutes to cook. Once cooked, the buns can be eaten hot (or cold in a packed lunch) - just steam again to reheat. The cooked buns will freeze well; they'll also keep in the fridge for a few days.

Char siu - Chinese barbecued pork

Char siu is a brilliantly versatile thing. Even if you're not familiar with it by name, you've almost certainly tasted it before; it's the reddish pork that appears in little pieces in every Special Fried Rice in every Chinese restaurant and takeaway in the country, in those wonderful fluffy buns you get as dim sum (my recipe for those buns is here), on its own over rice as a roast meat, and sliced thickly in a million different noodle dishes. It's a sweetly glazed, aromatically spiced, perfectly delicious piece of meat, and one of my very favourite things to do with pork.

This recipe makes a single fillet of char siu. I'd recommend you at least double it - you're going to need a whole fillet of the stuff for Monday's recipe, and you'll probably want to eat at least some as soon as it comes out of the oven. Char siu freezes well too, so you don't need to worry about cooking too much.

A note on the glaze and colour. The strips of char siu you'll see in Chinese shops are usually glazed with maltose, a sugary by-product of the brewing industry. It does achieve a really gorgeous, crackly sheen, but it's not got a lot of flavour or sweetness, and I find it's not as tasty as glazing with a honey/soy mixture, thinned with a little vegetable oil to help the sugar catch and caramelise. Shop-bought char siu is normally very red, because a little food colouring is used in the marinade. Feel free to add half a teaspoon to yours if you like - I find I'm happy with the less shocking colour the meat gets from the hoi sin sauce in its marinade.

To make one strip of char siu (enough for three as a roast meat on rice) you'll need:

1 pork fillet

Marinade
5 tablespoons light soya sauce
3 tablespoons dark soya sauce
5 tablespoons runny honey
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon five spice powder
½ glass Chinese rice wine (sherry will do if you can't find any)
3 tablespoons Hoisin sauce (I like Lee Kum Kee)
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, crushed
4 fat cloves of garlic, crushed

Glaze
2 tablespoons runny honey
1 tablespoon dark soya sauce
1 tablespoon vegetable oil

Mix all the marinade ingredients together and warm through in a saucepan until the sugar has all dissolved. Pour the warm marinade over the pork, and leave for at least eight hours in the fridge.

To cook the char siu, heat the oven to 210° C and place the meat, basted with some of its marinade, on a rack over a roasting tin with a couple of centimetres of water in it. Roast for 20 minutes, then baste again on both sides, turn the meat over and reduce the heat to 180° C. Roast for another ten minutes, then baste and turn again, and roast for a final ten minutes.

Transfer the meat to a plate, empty the tin of water and line it with foil. Place the meat and rack back on the tin, then brush it liberally with the glaze and put it under the grill for about five minutes, until the glaze is glossy and starting to catch at the edges. Turn the meat, glaze again and put back under the grill until the other side is also glossy and starting to caramelise.

Steak and wild mushroom pie

Astute readers will notice that recently I've been obsessing somewhat about puff pastry. This should be your last puff pastry recipe for a bit - use a roll from the supermarket chiller cabinet or make your own using the recipe for curry puffs.

Dried wild mushrooms are great. A small handful, especially when simmered for a long time with the meat as in this dish, will infuse the whole pie with a wonderful rich, earthy fragrance. I've also used some fresh mushrooms here to bulk out the pie and to add some texture. Try different kinds of mushroom when you make this - my dried mushrooms were cepes, summer boletes and girolles, while I chose lovely firm little Crimini mushrooms (a bit like button mushrooms, but a darker chestnut colour) to add at the end.

A note on the pastry decoration - a pastry rose on top of a pie is, in Lincolnshire, where my Great Grandma lived, a visual cue to remind you in the larder that it's a meat pie, and not a fruit pie. Just make a small pastry spiral for the centre and glue on some petals around the outside with some beaten egg.

To serve two (heartily) you'll need:

1 lb stewing steak, diced
8 shallots, quartered
3 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon flour
1 small handful dried mushrooms
1 punnet fresh mushrooms
Juice of ½ a lemon
1 wine glass vermouth
½ pint good stock
Salt and pepper
Olive oil and butter to fry
Puff pastry
1 egg, beaten

Set the dried mushrooms to soak in ½ a pint of freshly boiled water.

Brown the steak in batches in the olive oil, and remove to a plate. Set aside. Sauté the shallots in the same oil with two cloves of sliced garlic until they are soft, with brown edges. Return the meat to the pan with a tablespoon of flour and stir well. Add the mushrooms and their soaking liquid. Pour over the vermouth and the stock, and simmer with no lid on a low heat for an hour or so, until the sauce is thick and reduced.

Sauté the chopped fresh mushrooms in butter with another clove of garlic in a separate pan. When they give up their juices, add the lemon juice, and continue to cook until nearly all the liquid is gone. Stir into the reduced meat and mushroom pan, and season the whole mixture to taste.

Transfer the mixture to a pie dish and top with pastry. Cut a hole in the centre to allow the steam to escape, and decorate with a rose, glazing with the beaten egg. Bake the pie at 200° C for 25 minutes, until brown and glossy.

Curry puffs

I'm having a bit of a Malaysian food binge at the moment, and the beef curry puff is about as Malaysian as you can get. These little pasties are made from a mouth-meltingly short, flaky pastry, and are filled with a rich beef, onion and potato curry.

There are as many variations on the curry puff as there are cooks. Some prefer a shortcrust pastry, some like a chicken or vegetable filling - I've also seen sardine in Malaysia. Some are so fiercely spiced you need to cool your tongue between bites, some so subtle that they come across...well...a bit Cornish pasty. This recipe is just gorgeous - serve some curry puffs next time you have some friends round and just watch how fast they vanish. Try to use beef dripping to fry the filling if you can find it; it gives the curry puffs a delicious beefy depth. (Use vegetable oil if you can't find any.)

To make about 30 you'll need:

Filling
Beef dripping to fry
12 oz onions, diced
12 oz waxy potato, cut into 1cm cubes
1 teaspoon ginger, diced very fine
5 cloves garlic, diced very fine
8 shallots, sliced thinly
1 lb minced beef
4 tablespoons Madras curry powder
1 can coconut milk
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons caster sugar
3 teaspoons salt

Pastry
1 lb flour
4 oz butter
8 oz lard
1 egg, and another to glaze
2 tablespoons sugar
Juice of ½ a lemon
6 fl oz water

Start by cooking the filling. Stir fry the onions in a tablespoon of beef dripping until they are soft and transluscent. Remove them to a bowl and set aside. Add another tablespoon of dripping to the pan and fry the potato cubes in the same wok with a pinch of salt until they begin to take on a little colour, then pour over 4 fl oz of water and put the lid on, reducing the heat to a simmer. Cook for between five and ten minutes, until the potatoes are cooked through. Put them in the bowl with the onions.

In the same wok, stir fry the ginger, garlic and shallots in a little more dripping. When the spices are giving off their scent, add the beef and stir-fry for five minutes until well mixed. Add the curry powder and continue to stir-fry until all the beef is coloured. Add the onion and potato, stir thoroughly, then add the coconut milk, sugar, salt and lemon juice.

Reduce the heat to a low simmer, and reduce the mixture until it's thick and glistening. Taste, adding more lemon juice and salt if you think it needs it. Cool and refrigerate. (This is important - you'll find the puffs much easier to fill if the curry is cold. A warm filling will be slightly runny.)
You can make the pastry and fill the puffs on the same day you prepare the filling, but the filling is one of these things that really improves by being kept in the fridge for a day - the flavours deepen and meld.

To make the pastry, mix the egg, sugar, salt, water and lemon in a measuring jug and refrigerate until it's nice and cold. Sieve the flour into a bowl, and rub in the butter until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. Cut the lard into little cubes (about the same size as you cut the potato) and blend it well with the flour/butter mixture. Add the contents of the measuring jug and bring everything together gently with your hands. Rest the pastry in the fridge, wrapped in clingfilm, for an hour.

Slice the pastry in two and roll out half into a thin rectangle. Fold the rectangle into three (as if you were folding an A4 sheet to fit in an envelope) and roll it out again. Repeat the folding and rolling four times. Cut out rounds about ½ cm thick with a large fluted pastry cutter and repeat the process with the other piece of pastry. (If you've scraps left over, just roll them out and use the cutter on them.)

Beat an egg and put it in a cup where you can reach it easily as you work.

Put a tablespoon of filling in the middle of each pastry circle, and wipe some beaten egg around half the edge. Press each edge together to seal and crimp the curry puff. Arrange the puffs on a baking tray and brush each with the beaten egg to glaze.

Bake at 230° C for the first 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 200° for 20 minutes. Cool (if you can bear to - ours usually go straight from the oven into slobbering mouths) on a cake rack.

Malaysian braised pork with steamed buns

My Dad, like dads the world over, has a particular love for fatty foods from his childhood. (Here he is on the left of the picture, with my Mum and Dr Weasel.) He's not allowed them very often, largely because Mummy has very sensible intimations of mortality when looking at chunks of lard. Of course, the fact that he grew up in rural China and Malaysia makes that bit harder to find the things he remembers fondly in the UK. These foods are things like sweetened olives; Kong Piang (a special kind of Foochow biscuit you can only find in two towns in Malaysia); good Bak Kwa (flattened, sweetened, spicy barbecued pork); real satay, cooked ourdoors over fanned charcoal with the bites of meat separated by tiny nuggets of pork fat; and a million things made out of the obnoxious parts of a pig.

Mummy, the family cholesterol-conscience, went to Bordeaux last week to visit my increasingly famous brother and to add to her own high-powered wine-tasting qualifications. I was concerned that Daddy, left on his own unsupervised, would just eat congee (rice porridge) all week straight from the rice cooker, so I cooked one of those childhood-in-paradise dishes and we drove it over as a surprise. This recipe is adapted from Mrs Leong Yee Soo's The Best of Malaysian Cooking, my favourite Malaysian cookery book. The dish is a family must-eat whenever we visit Malaysia.

If you cook this, you don't strictly need the steamed buns to accompany the meat; having said that, you'll really be missing out if you don't make them. This is the same dough you'll find in char siu buns. It's the perfect foil to the salty, aromatic pork, and the dough itself is just gorgeous to work with. It's sugary, so the yeast works hard, and you'll find it beautifully soft and puffy, like a baby's cheek. The traditional technique will have you fold the oiled bun in half before steaming, so it opens when finished like a pristine sandwich bun for you to pack with meat and juices. To serve four with some left over for lunch, you'll need: