Refried beans with salsa and chorizo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bombay new potatoes

Here's the recipe I promised last week to use up the other half of that curry paste. I particularly like new potatoes in this sort of dry curry; their waxy texture and delicate flavour works very well against the aromatic spicing, and leaving the skins on helps them finish with a nice crisp.

600g new potatoes
Half of Friday's curry paste
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
Flavourless oil or ghee to fry
Salt
Fresh coriander to garnish

If you didn't cook the peas keema, Friday's curry paste was made with 1 peeled bulb of garlic, 10 spring onions, 1 fat piece of ginger, about 5cm long and 4 green chillies. I used half of it for the peas keema and the other half for this recipe, which makes a fantastic accompaniment for the lamb and peas. If you're only cooking one of the recipes, either make up a whole batch of curry paste and freeze half, or just halve the amounts.

A few hours before you cook the meal, steam the new potatoes for 25 minutes, drain and leave in the saucepan to cool completely. When cold, chop them in half (or quarters, if yours are large).

When you are ready to start cooking, stir the turmeric into the curry paste. Bring a couple of tablespoons of oil or ghee to temperature in a large, non-stick saucepan over a medium flame, and sauté the whole fennel seeds in the hot oil for a few seconds. Add the curry paste (now bright yellow) and fry, stirring all the time, for a couple of minutes. Tip in the potatoes with a large pinch of salt and keep frying, stirring every now and then, for about 10 minutes until the potatoes are crusty and golden. Serve immediately. These potatoes are also extremely good cold.

Game chips

There are occasions on which a roast potato will not do. (I'll admit that these occasions are few.) For those days, these game chips are very easy to make, deliciously crispy, and packed with flavour from crispy garlic, crushed chillies, and plenty of fresh oregano.

I've used smoked Maldon salt here. It's a relatively recent arrival in UK supermarkets (and I actually saw some speciality delis selling it in Lille, which made me smile), and I've been using it in place of ordinary salt in a few recipes. It's very good here, but if you can't find some just use ordinary flaky salt. If you can find some, you can make an excellent Martini by adding a pinch of the smoked salt with a teaspoon of lavender honey and a sprig of lavender to a couple of shots of iced Grey Goose.

To serve two as a generous accompaniment, you'll need:

4 good-sized King Edward potatoes
1 large handful (about 20g) oregano
2 large pinches (use all your fingers when you pinch, not just your forefinger) smoked salt
1 teaspoon crushed Italian chillies
4 fat cloves garlic
Pepper to taste
Olive oil

Pour a generous amount of oil (enough to cover the bottom) into your largest frying pan. Slice the potatoes into eight wedges each. Bring the oil up to a high temperature and lay the potatoes in the pan for about 10-15 minutes, until they are turning gold and crisp. Flip them over and cook them on the other side for another 10-15 minutes.

While the potatoes are cooking, chop the oregano finely and crush the garlic. As always, I'd recommend you use a Microplane grater to deal with the garlic - it's the fastest, most mess-free way I've found to reduce garlic to a pulp, and you won't get the stringy bits you get with a dedicated garlic crusher.

When the potatoes are crisp and gold on both sides, stir the garlic through them vigorously with a wooden spoon or spatula, until the sticky garlic is distributed properly throughout the pan. Keep moving it around the pan with your spoon until it too is golden - the crispy garlic bits should adhere nicely to your potatoes. Scatter over the chilli, salt and some pepper straight from the grinder, then the oregano. Toss with your wooden spoon and serve immediately. Hopelessly easy, and much nicer than a chip.

I rather like these game chips drizzled with a bit of lemon juice.

Som tum - Thai green papaya salad

Thanks for being so patient while I bunked off from blogging and from my other work for an indolent week. It's been lovely - I've been to the seaside, got sunburned, drunk lots of lovely summery booze, eaten some great meals, and done lots of work on new recipes: it means I'm able to come back to you fully recharged. There's lots to look forward to over a very busy couple of months to come, when I'll be blogging from Cardiff, a cruise ship just outside Southampton, New Orleans, then Vegas and Phoenix - you can probably see why I felt I needed a short break before getting back down to things!

So then: som tum. You might have ordered this dish (and if you haven't, you should; I'd rate it as one of the world's best salads) in a good Thai restaurant. Green papaya makes the base of this salad, its dense, crisp texture made the most of with some careful shredding with a sharp knife. It's bathed in a dressing which, for me, promotes it right to the head of the international salad flavour conspiracy. (See also: coban salatasi, panzanella and Swedish cucumber salad.) Som tum dressing touches every part of your tongue. It's sweet with palm sugar, salty and umami with fish sauce and dried shrimp, sour with fresh lime juice, and spiked with chilli to give the whole mouth heat. Some aromatic herbs give it a lovely nose as well - for my tastes, this is about as good a picnic dish as you could make.

Green papaya is surprisingly neutral in flavour. If you can't find any, Natacha de Pont du Bie, who encountered it in Laos, found to her pleasure that you can substitute a raw turnip in similar Laotian salads and that doing so will even fool Laotians, so I don't see why you shouldn't make the same substitution here. My papaya came from the Chinese supermarket on the railway bridge on Mill Road in Cambridge, and other oriental supermarkets with good fruit and veg sections will probably be able to help you too.

To serve up to six as a side dish, you'll need:

1 green papaya
2 fat cloves of garlic
1 Scotch bonnet chilli (or three or four Thai bird's eye chillies)
1 small handful (about 20g) dried shrimp (available from the Chinese supermarket in the chiller section)
8 cherry tomatoes
Juice of 2 limes
2 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons palm sugar (use soft dark brown sugar if you can't find any)
1 large handful coriander, chopped finely
1 small handful mint, chopped finely

Start by shredding the papaya. Peel it with a potato peeler (surprisingly easy), and cut into the thinnest possible strips. Some find that holding the papaya in one hand and making lengthways cuts like lots of guitar strings halfway into the fruit, then slicing down along those cuts so the shreds fall away from the fruit, is a good method. I prefer to cut the whole fruit into thin pages, and then cut piles of those into strips, because I have trouble with the hollow centre of the fruit when using the first method. Put the shredded papaya into a large bowl.

Crush the garlic thoroughly in a pestle and mortar, and add the shrimp, pounding it with the garlic for about 20 seconds. The shrimp won't reduce to shrimpy rubble, but they should be well-squished and full of flavour from the garlic. Mix the garlic and shrimp well with the papaya in the large bowl, and add the halved tomatoes, tossing everything in the bowl thoroughly as if to bruise the tomatoes and papaya a little.

Make the dressing in a jam jar so you can adjust seasoning as you go. Add the lime juice, fish sauce, palm sugar and very finely chopped chilli to the jar and shake it with the lid on until the palm sugar has dissolved. Taste the sauce - you may feel it needs to be sweeter, saltier or more sour depending on your taste, so adjust it with some extra juice, sauce or sugar. Pour it over the salad in the bowl, add the finely chopped herbs and toss vigorously again.

This salad will hang around happily for hours, so it's great to take to a picnic. I particularly love it with fatty meats or barbecued foods, or, of course, to accompany a Thai main dish.

Will you look at that - a hailstorm. Looks like I chose just the right moment to get back to work.

Caramelised onion, horseradish and blue cheese crusted steak

Sometimes, you might find yourself in possession of a less-than-handsome steak. Now, if your steak is richly marbled, fat and nicely aged, I wouldn't recommend you do more than rub it with olive oil, salt and pepper - maybe a little garlic too - and grill it briefly. The pieces of topside I found myself with needed a bit more help, so I came up with this recipe.

I've been spending lots of time hanging out at the Polish deli in Newmarket recently - I've already told you about the salt pork and cherry juice, and I'm really enjoying the smoked sausages and pickled herring. I decided to sample some Polish horseradish (chrzan) after reading an extremely enthusiastic hymn to it in a book I was editing a few weeks ago, and found that if anything, the author wasn't giving it all the love it deserves. English creamed horseradish can be a bit wet and insipid, but this Polish stuff is fiery, sweet and intensely fragrant - just sniffing the jar caused hallucinatory roast sirloins of beef to parade before my eyes. Look out for it in your local Polish deli - some supermarkets now have a Polish aisle too. You might also be able to find a variant called cwikla, which is horseradish with sweet red beets. It's delicious, but it'll make the crust here an alarming pink.

The crust on this steak is soft and light under its buttery, crisp surface, and is full of flavours which make the very best of your steak. To make enough to crust four steaks, you'll need:

1 large onion
3 heaped tablespoons Polish horseradish sauce (or whatever you can find)
3 heaped tablespoons crumbled blue cheese (choose something strong - I used an elderly Bleu d'Auvergne)
100g fine, fresh breadcrumbs (just whizz white bread in the food processor)
100g butter
1 bunch (about 15g) chives
Salt and pepper
Olive oil

I also made some garlic-lemon green beans, which used the meat juices. If you want to make these too, you'll need:

100g green beans
2 fat cloves of garlic
Zest and juice of one lemon
Salt and pepper

Get the steaks out of the fridge well before you want to cook them to allow them to come to room temperature. Rub them with olive oil, salt and pepper, and set them aside. While the steaks are coming up to temperature, prepare the crust.

Cut the onion into very fine dice, and fry over a low heat in two tablespoons of the butter, stirring regularly, until the onion is a lovely golden caramel colour. Put the cooked onion with its butter into a large mixing bowl, and melt the rest of the butter in the onion pan. While the butter is melting, use the back of a fork to blend the onion in the bowl with the cheese - try to distribute the cheese as evenly as you can. Stir through the horseradish, then stir the breadcrumbs into the mixture, adding the melted butter bit by bit until you have a mixture that is still loose, but that holds together when pressed. Stir the chives through the crust mixture, taste and season. (If your cheese is particularly salty, you may not need any extra salt.)

Cook the steaks for a minute per side in olive oil in a very hot frying pan - just enough to sear them on each side. Remove to a plate, keeping the oil in the pan. Divide the crust mixture into four and press it into the top of each steak. (If you find you have some left over, you can just make it into a little rectangle and grill it along with the steaks for a cook's treat.) While you are working, some of the steak juices will come out of the steak onto the plate. Hold onto these for the beans, which cook very quickly, so you can do them as the crust grills.

Transfer the steaks with their topping to a grillpan and put under the grill for 6-8 minutes (or as long as you find your topping takes to go golden and crisp on top). Transfer to warm plates to rest for a few minutes before serving. I served this with some roast potatoes and more of that lovely horseradish.

To make the beans, warm the olive oil you seared the steaks in, and fry the garlic in it for a few seconds before tipping the topped, tailed and chopped beans in. Toss the beans around the pan until they start to turn bright green, then pour over the lemon juice mixed with the zest and the steak juices. Allow the liquid to bubble up and reduce a little, check the seasoning, then remove to a hot serving dish.

Aubergines with den miso

Years ago, before I'd even met Dr W, I had a boyfriend whose sister-in-law was Japanese. She and I didn't agree on much, but we did agree that these aubergines (which she made every time I visited her house) are pretty sublime.

Takako used to make this using those lovely wee Japanese aubergines - the sort that leave you gasping with their visual similarity to eggs and explain the whole eggplant nomenclature thing (not obvious when you are 18 and the only eggplants you have ever met are purple and shaped like a torpedo). Happily for those of us without a supplier of dear little Japanese aubergines, this works very well with the purple sort too. Aubergines are a wonderfully meaty sort of vegetable. Although this works really well as an accompaniment, this lovely meatiness means that you can happily serve this dish as the main event, with rice and perhaps a salad dressed with some rice vinegar. It's also a good win if you have an unexpected visiting veggie, and, being one of those things you serve at room temperature, I think it's really, really good as part of a picnic. These do soak up quite a lot of oil, as is common with aubergines, but hell - it's not like you're making this dish every day. To serve two, you'll need:

2 medium aubergines
200g shiromiso (white miso)
2 tablespoons sake (Chinese rice wine is good here if you have no sake)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons mirin
6 tablespoons ground nut oil

As usual, if you're having trouble finding white miso, head for a large independent health food shop. They tend to have a bewilderingly good selection of miso, seaweeds, pickled ginger and the like. I have no idea why, given that most of the other nutty, protein-knitted, fermenty things masquerading as food that the health food shop I use sells are things I have no interest in ingesting at all. Boo hippies.

Start by slicing the aubergines into three lengthways. Slash the cut surfaces diagonally, without cutting all the way through the flesh, and without cutting the skin. Fry in the hot oil over a medium heat, turning halfway through, until the skin and flesh is golden brown, and the aubergine is soft.

While the aubergine slices are frying, make the den miso by combining the mirin, sugar, sake and miso in a small frying pan and bringing to a very gentle simmer, stirring all the time. Cook the sauce for two minutes and keep warm until the aubergines are cooked.

Move the cooked aubergines to a plate and smear the hot den miso all over their upper surface, making sure the paste gets into the slashes. Leave the slices to come down to room temperature before serving - for some reason, this dish is all the more delicious when it's cold.

Cauliflower cheese

There's something disproportionately impressive about wheeling a whole cauliflower out to the table, glistening in a robe of scented, cheesy sauce. It raises cauliflower cheese from a nursery tea dish to the sort of thing you might serve as a dinner party accompaniment.

I only ever make cauliflower cheese when I can find a pristine cauliflower. The cauli you choose should be firm and white, and still surrounded by its green leaves, which should be stiff, not floppy (floppy leaves mean the cauliflower has been out of the ground for too long). Don't use a cauliflower with any bruised bits visible.

The Mornay sauce that's slathered all over the cauliflower is a little more complicated than usual; the milk for the sauce is infused with aromatic herbs for a couple of hours before making the sauce up. It's worth the tiny amount of extra effort. You'll end up with a delicately scented, Parmesan-savoury cloud of white curds, a much finer dish than the wet stuff you remember from school.

To serve four as an accompaniment or two as a main course (if you're eating this as a dish on its own, it's very good with some toasted sourdough bread to mop up the lovely sauce) you'll need:

1 large, firm, fresh cauliflower (around 1kg)
300ml whole milk
1 shallot
5 cloves
10 peppercorns
2 bay leaves
1 bunch parsley
75g butter
75g plain flour
A grating of nutmeg
1 teaspoon dry mustard powder
150g grated Parmesan cheese plus a couple of tablespoons for sprinkling
Salt

A few hours before you start to eat, cut the shallot in half and stud it with the cloves. Place it in a saucepan with the bay leaves, parsley and peppercorns and pour over the milk. Bring the milk up to a gentle simmer, put the lid on and remove from the heat, leaving in a warm place for about three hours.

When you are ready to assemble the dish, use a sharp knife to remove all the outer leaves from the cauliflower except the very fine ones from the inner layer of leaves which curl around the curds. Cut the stalk off the bottom of the vegetable so it will sit flat when placed on a plate. Cut two big slashes in a cross shape into the bottom of the stalk - this will help the thickest part of the cauliflower to steam faster, so nothing will overcook and the whole vegetable retains a good texture. (Nothing is worse than a soggy cauliflower cheese.)

Steam the cauliflower in a large pan for twenty minutes, and heat the oven to 180°C (350°F).

While the cauliflower is steaming, make up the Mornay sauce. Melt the butter in a heavy-based saucepan with the flour, and stir well over a low heat for three or four minutes - do not allow the roux (flour/butter mixture) to brown. Strain the milk and discard the aromatics. Add the milk to the pan very gradually, stirring all the time, until you have a thick white sauce. Stir the cheese, mustard and nutmeg through the sauce to finish.

Place the steamed cauliflower in an ovenproof serving dish, and spoon the thick sauce all over the cauliflower. Bake in the hot oven for 30 minutes - the sauce will be bubbling. Finish the dish by spooning some more of the sauce from the dish over the cauliflower and sprinkling over the extra grated parmesan, then placing under the grill until the cheese is golden and bubbling. Serve immediately.

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.

Christmas stuffing and chipolatas

I mentioned the other day that you're best off not stuffing the cavity of a turkey or, for that matter, a chicken - it increases the cooking time to an unacceptable length, and quite honestly, stuffing is just nicer prepared outside the bird, where it has a chance to go crispy on the outside. The trimmings are one of the most important parts of a Christmas dinner, but they can be a bit of a faff to prepare, so I like to assemble and cook mine on Christmas Eve, and heat them up at the last minute on Christmas Day - you really can't tell that the stuffing and chipolatas have been reheated, and they're absolutely delicious.

Buy the very best chipolatas you can find. I was in Yorkshire for Christmas, and went to Booths, which is a simply fantastic supermarket. Quality and choice here is better than at any of the supermarkets we have here in Cambridgeshire (even Waitrose); I ended up with a pack of chipolatas flavoured with chestnut purée which were as good as any butcher's sausage. Unfortunately, Booths only operates in Lancashire, Cheshire, Cumbria and Yorkshire, so the rest of us are stuck with having to make a trip to the butcher's for the chipolatas and for the sausage meat which goes in the stuffing, which should be of the best quality you can find.

For Christmas trimmings (or trimmings for any poultry or game you happen to be roasting for a non-Christmas occasion) you'll need:

Stuffing
85g Paxo sage and onion stuffing mix (I know, I know - bear with me here)
250g good-quality sausage meat
1 Braeburn apple
2 banana shallots
1 pack vacuum-sealed chestnuts
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh sage
75g butter
Boiling water
Salt and pepper

Chipolatas
16 chipolata sausages
16 strips pancetta

Paxo stuffing mix? Well, despite the memories you may have of childhood Paxo made up by your grandmother to the packet instructions (dusty, squashy and very little fun), it works really, really well when you combine it with sausage meat. The recipe for Paxo is more than a hundred years old; it was invented by a Manchester butcher in 1901. I'm using it here because the wheat and barley rusk that forms the crumbs contains a bit of raising agent, which will make the texture of your stuffing very light, with a crisp outside - and the dried sage and onion are actually really good against a porky background.

Put the stuffing mix in a large mixing bowl with the butter, and pour over boiling water, according to the packet instructions. Stir well and cover with a teatowel while you chop the apple, shallots and chestnuts into small, even dice, and chop the sage finely. When you're done, the stuffing mix should be cool enough to handle. Use your fingers to mix the sausage meat very thoroughly with the stuffing mix, then add the chopped apple, shallots and chestnuts and sage with a little salt and some pepper, and mix with your hands until everything is evenly distributed. Form into spheres about the size of a ping-pong ball and lay on well-greased baking trays. (The stuffing balls will almost certainly stick a bit, but you can prise them off relatively easily with a stiff spatula.)

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Wrap each sausage in a strip of pancetta. You don't need to secure these with a toothpick (as well as saving you time, this also avoids any Christmas day toothpick-embedded-in-palate accidents). Arrange the sausages on another well greased tray.

Bake the sausages and stuffing balls for between 35 and 45 minutes (the cooking time will depend on the characteristics of the sausages and sausage meat you have chosen). The stuffing balls should be browning and crisp on the outside, and the pancetta crisp and golden. Remove from the trays when cooled, and move the stuffing balls and wrapped sausages to oven-proof bowls. When you come to serve them, just reheat at 180°C (350°F) for 12 minutes.

Cranberry sauce and bread sauce

These two sauces, one American and one thoroughly, thoroughly English, are an essential part of my Christmas dinner - it's just not Christmas without them. Cranberries are incredibly tart when raw, and I consider them pretty inedible (despite the Finnish habit of eating them raw, with shaved ice and caramel). This recipe is very easy, and it transforms them; cooked until they pop with sugar and a lovely lemony liqueur, a lot of the bitterness vanishes. The sauce is the perfect accompaniment to your turkey or goose on Christmas day, or to some Christmas Eve ham.

If your only experience of bread sauce so far is the stuff you reconstitute from a packet, you are likely to have read the title of this post, pulled a face and sworn never to make it yourself. You'll be missing a treat - made properly, it's a creamy, fragrant cloud that you'll find yourself slathering all over a good roast dinner, potatoes and all. The trick is in infusing the milk with aromatics like bay, shallots and plenty of cloves for a good long time, so that the sauce is rich with flavour. (A bad bread sauce is a bland nightmare.) I make this year-round, and it's great with any roast poultry or game birds. It's also extremely good cold as part of a Boxing Day leftovers sandwich.

The cranberry sauce can be made well in advance, and keeps for weeks, covered, in the fridge. All the preparation for the bread sauce (setting the milk to infuse, making the breadcrumbs) can be done the night before you eat, which means that you won't be in such a rush to pull the different elements of your meal together on Christmas Day.

To make the cranberry sauce you'll need:

350g raw cranberries
200g sugar (granulated or caster)
30ml Limoncello liqueur
zest of 1 lemon
60ml water

This is hopelessly easy. Just stick all the ingredients in a small saucepan, bring to a brisk simmer and cook for 10-15 minutes, until all the cranberries have popped. You'll be able to hear the individual berries pop as they heat up, which is somehow rather pleasing. The cranberries are full of pectin, so the sauce will solidify as it cools. Keep it in the fridge until you need it, and stir through briskly before serving so it doesn't look like a chunk of jelly.

To make the bread sauce, you'll need:

1l full-fat milk
200g fresh breadcrumbs (just put 200g of crustless white bread in the food processor and whizz)
3 bay leaves
1 sprig thyme
2 shallots
20 cloves
10 black peppercorns
100g salted butter
100ml double cream
1 teaspoon salt

Cut the shallots in halves and press the cloves into them. Put them in a large saucepan with the milk, bay leaves, thyme, peppercorns and salt. Warm the milk to the barest simmer - the milk should be shuddering rather than bubbling. Remove from the heat, cover the pan and leave it in a warm place overnight. (I put mine on top of the boiler.)

About an hour before you plan to eat, sieve the solid ingredients out of the milk and return the liquid to the pan. Bring to a gentle simmer and stir in the breadcrumbs and cream. Remove from the heat again and lay a piece of cling film right on top of the sauce (this stops it forming a skin). The breadcrumbs will swell with the milk, stiffening the sauce. When you are ready to serve the bread sauce, bring it up to a simmer again and stir in the butter. Taste for seasoning, adding more salt if you think it needs it.

Maple-mustard glazed vegetables

British readers will notice that the baby vegetables they are able to buy at the moment are, for babies, somewhat husky. This is because EU legislation, which was only repealed last week and which will remain in force until July 2009, sets strict rules for the dimensions of vegetables - carrots may not be sold, even as baby carrots, if they weigh under 8g.

Legislation on the weight, symmetry, roundness, straightness, evenness and colour of vegetables in the EU has, in my experience, been roundly ignored by market sellers in France, Italy and Spain, while it's prosecuted with zeal by UK council officials. (Meanwhile, amazingly, it was the French, Italians and Spanish who were in particular opposition to any change in legislation - I am at a total loss to understand how it comes to be the rigid old British and the Germans who are calling the situation as it is untenable.) It's good to know that these protectionist rules, which used to result in the waste of around 20% of all farm produce, are being dumped as a result of the EU-wide rise in food costs, and I look forward to the appearance of spurred and bendy cucumbers in my local supermarket. Meanwhile, I wish they'd extend the repeal of these rules to all vegetables - even once next year's changes come into force, it will still be illegal to sell imperfect apples and pears (note that a lot of old English varieties are rusty and spotty, and as such impossible to sell legally) unless you slap a label on them saying “product intended for processing”. Citrus fruit, kiwi fruit, lettuces, peaches and nectarines, pears, strawberries, sweet peppers, table grapes and tomatoes will also remain covered by the old legislation. I long for a funny-shaped tomato, or one of those lovely ripply peppers. The law in this area is a mess, protecting the interests of farmers while raising prices, putting financial pressure on householders and excluding us from choice and flavour. Sometimes I feel my best option might be to turn the back garden into an allotment.

Anyway. I seem to have gone off on a tangent. These glazed carrots and radishes are delicious, extremely easy to make, and not as bad for you as you might imagine. They're a regular fixture on our table at Christmas, but they're fantastic at any time of year. I have faked true baby Chantenay carrots here with the judicious trimming of pubescent-but-legal, 8-gram Chantenays. Until next year, you'll have to do the same. Or emigrate.To serve two, you'll need:

12 baby carrots
12 radishes
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1 heaped tablespoon grainy Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon salt
50g butter
50ml water

Top and tail the radishes. Top and tail the carrots and trim them to be a similar size to the radishes. Melt the butter with the water, maple syrup, salt and mustard in a small saucepan, and bring the mixture to a gentle simmer. Cook the carrots in the mixture over a low heat, stirring, for about eight minutes, then add the radishes and cook for a further two minutes. Serve immediately, with some of the glaze drizzled over the top.

Roast buttered chestnuts

Roast chestnuts - another truly seasonal ingredient. When I was a kid, they were a real treat. We bought them in paper twists from the man with a roasting cart outside the British Museum, we gathered them in the woods to roast them in the oven at home, and once, excitingly, we roasted them on a coal shovel in the fireplace, one chestnut left unpricked so it exploded like a violent kitchen timer to tell us when it was ready.

Now, chestnuts just roasted in their skins and eaten immediately are delicious. But an Italian friend at university taught me to sauté the peeled chestnuts in butter and sprinkle them with coarse salt after roasting, and it's now far and away my favourite way to prepare them. The butter kicks up the flavour a notch, the sautéing does wonderful things to the chestnuts' texture, and a scattering of coarse salt (I used a French fleur de sel) is the perfect contrast to the sweet, fluffy flesh of the chestnuts.

If you're stuck in the UK, you're likely to be stuck with the English chestnut, which has a papery pith inside the shell, covering the nut. It's a pest to remove, and is easiest to take off while the chestnuts are still very hot - this is easiest to deal with if you are one of the asbestos fingered fraternity. It's great if you can find someone to help you peel - it gets the job done faster, so you can get to the chestnuts when the piths will still come away easily.

The Chinese chestnut, a little smaller than the English variety, has no inner pith, and we ate them by the bushel-load when I was a kid in Malaysia. They're a lovely chestnut - if you can find some where you are, grab plenty and freeze some - all raw chestnuts freeze well. In the USA this pithless Asian variety has been hybridised with the sugary American variety, so you can buy big, fat, achingly sweet chestnuts without any papery pith. I hope British growers will cotton on to this trick soon - they're appallingly good. When you buy your chestnuts, try to find some which are plump and glossy. They lose moisture and flavour quickly, so it's a good idea to either freeze them until you're ready to cook them or to cook them as soon as you get them home.

To roast and sauté enough chestnuts (of whatever variety you choose) to serve four, you'll need:

1kg fresh chestnuts
2 large tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons salt to sprinkle

Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F). While the oven is warming, cut a cross in the flat side of each chestnut with a sharp knife - try to pierce the skin without cutting into the flesh. This is very important - an unpierced chestnut will explode when it cooks, so make sure you don't miss any!

Arrange the chestnuts on baking sheets and roast for 25 minutes. Start to peel as soon as you can bear to touch them (this way it will be easier to remove the pith) and set the peeled chestnuts aside.

Melt the butter in a large frying pan and throw the peeled chestnuts in when it starts to bubble. Saute, keeping the nuts on the move, until all the butter is absorbed and any crumbly bits of nut are turning gold and crisp (about 5 minutes). Turn out into bowls and scatter salt over. Serve immediately.

Spiced parmesan parsnips

One of my very favourite Delia Smith recipes is this lovely way with roast parsnips, where she tosses them in grated parmesan and flour before cooking. My Grandma used to make Delia's parsnips every Christmas, and there was always a fight over who got the last few.

It's funny, really; in the UK, parsnips are a very ordinary accompaniment to a roast dinner, a slightly posh vegetable to be rolled out only on Sunday lunchtimes. Elsewhere in the world, the parsnip is considered more appropriate for feeding animals than people. Part of this is down to our climate. Parsnips need exposure to frost for their flavour to be fully developed, so in warmer places the parsnip is a less impressive beast, weedy and comparatively flavourless - hence the French tendency to feed them to pigs rather than people.

This is my version of the Delia recipe my Grandma used to cook. I've changed the fat used - you'll get a much better crisp using dripping, and the flavour you'll achieve with a good butcher's pot of beef dripping is amazingly good if you serve these next to roast beef . I've also upped the ratio of parmesan and added some curry powder (always unbelievably good with a parsnip) and lots of lemon zest and fresh basil, which lifts the whole dish. Result: crunchy, savoury parsnips, sweetly fluffy inside and amazingly crisp outside - and so delicious you too will be fighting over the leftovers.

To serve eight with a roast, you'll need:

1.25kg parsnips
175g plain flour
100g parmesan, grated finely
1 tablespoon medium curry powder (I like Bolst's)
Grated zest of 2 lemons
1 heaped teaspoon salt
3 large tablespoons beef dripping
3 tablespoons chopped fresh basil

Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F). Put a heavy roasting dish containing the dripping in the oven as it heats up. Combine the flour, parmesan, curry powder, salt and lemon zest in a large mixing bowl. Peel the parsnips and cut them in half across their width. Cut the top half of each parsnip into four long pieces, and the bottom half into two.

Cook the prepared parsnips in boiling water for five minutes. Remove the saucepan from the heat and drain the parsnips a few at a time, rolling the steaming-hot parsnips in the flour mixture and setting aside on a plate. When all the parsnips are coated thoroughly, remove the roasting dish from the oven and arrange the parsnips in the hot fat (careful - it may spit). Put the dish of parsnips high in the oven for 20 minutes, turn the parsnips and put back in the oven for another 20 minutes.

When the parsnips are ready, they'll be a lovely golden colour. Remove them to a serving dish and sprinkle generously with basil.

Mexican pickled red onions

These crisp, pink onions are a traditional Yucatan accompaniment for cochinita pibil, and oh, my beating heart, they're good. Red onions are par-boiled very briefly, then semi-preserved in a citrus, sugar and salt mixture spiked with chillies and cumin. They'll keep in the fridge for up to a month, which is good, good news, because besides being a perfectly pitched addition to a taco, these are one of the best accompaniments for strong cheeses I've come across. (Try some alongside a Stilton or some Gorgonzola.) They're great to look at, too; the acid in the preserving mixture turns the red onion, which acts as a universal indicator, a really vibrant pink.

I've used a little home-made habanero vinegar in the preserving mixture. It's a particularly delicious vinegar (and very easy - just steep a few whole habaneros in a bottle of white wine vinegar for a couple of weeks) - it picks up all the citrusy, fruity undertones of the habaneros and packs plenty of heat.

To make a large bowl of Barbie-toned pickled onions, you'll need:

2 medium red onions
Juice of 1 orange
Juice of 3 limes
Juice of 2 lemons
2 tablespoons habanero vinegar (white wine vinegar in which you've steeped a few habanero chillies for a week or so - see above)
1 teaspoon cumin
1 tablespoon sea salt
1½ tablespoons caster sugar

Halve the onions, and cut into slices. Bring a saucepan of water to the boil and drop in the onion slices. Count to twenty and drain the onions, and set aside in a large bowl.

Stir the citrus juices, vinegar, cumin, salt and sugar together in a saucepan and bring to the boil, stirring until the sugar and salt has dissolved. As soon as the mixture starts boiling, remove it from the heat and pour it over the onions. Cover the bowl and refrigerate until cold (a couple of hours).

Bubble and squeak

Update, Jan 2009: Gordon Brown has just announced that bubble and squeak (or, specifically, rumbledethumps, the Scottish name for the dish) is his favourite meal. I've gone right off the stuff.

I mentioned to a group of friends from America that I was planning on cooking bubble and squeak for supper. They all chorused: "What the hell?" One said that the name suggested the boiling of mice. I suspect that this is one of those recipes which needs a short introduction.

Bubble and squeak is a traditional English supper dish made from the leftovers of a roast dinner. It should always contain potatoes and a brassica (I like spring cabbage for its sweetness, but other, more robust cabbages are often used, and some people like - gulp - Brussels sprouts). There is usually some meat - often whatever you roasted the night before, sometimes anointed with a little gravy. The idea is that first the potatoes and cabbage will have been boiled (bubble), and that when packed down hard into a sauté pan, the mixture should squeak.

What I cooked strayed pretty far from tradition - I didn't used leftover boiled potatoes, but grated some raw ones, rosti-style. I didn't have any leftovers from a roast, so I used some lovely smoky lardons of bacon and a dollop of beef dripping - a fat you can buy from your butcher in tubs and should always have in your fridge. Along with some sweet cabbage, spring onions and plenty of pepper and nutmeg, you've got a panful of fried English goodness fit for the Queen.

To serve four as an accompaniment for some good sausages, you'll need:

6 medium potatoes
1 sweetheart cabbage
10 large spring onions (scallions)
150g smoked bacon lardons
2 tablespoons beef dripping
A generous grating of nutmeg
Salt and pepper

A note here - if you're using leftover boiled potatoes, just mash them roughly into chunky bits with a fork before starting, rather than grating and squeezing them, and reduce the cooking time by five minutes on each side.

Put the lardons in a dry frying pan and cook over a medium temperature, turning occasionally, until golden (about ten minutes). Set aside.

Grate the potatoes. You don't need to peel them first. The easiest and quickest way to do this is to use the grating blade on your food processor. Take handfuls of the grated potato and squeeze it hard over the kitchen sink. A lot of liquid will be forced out. Put the squeezed potato shreds in your largest mixing bowl and fluff them up with your fingers so they're not in squeezed blocks any more - this will make mixing the other ingredients with them easier later on.

Shred the cabbage finely (a bread knife is, for some reason, much easier to shred a cabbage with than a cook's knife). Shred the spring onions finely too. Use your hands to mix the cabbage, spring onions and lardons thoroughly with the potato, adding about a teaspoon of salt, a generous grating of nutmeg and plenty of freshly ground black pepper.

Heat a tablespoon of dripping in a large, non-stick frying pan over a high flame until it begins to shimmer. Pile the bubble and squeak mixture into the pan and use a spatula to push the mixture into a rosti-like patty, packing it down hard into the edges of the pan. Lower the flame to medium/low, and leave to cook for 20 minutes.

When 20 minutes are up, you'll notice that the vegetables on the top surface of the bubble and squeak are turning translucent. Put a large plate on top of the frying pan and turn the whole arrangement upside-down, so the bubble and squeak turns out neatly onto the plate. Turn the heat back up, add the remaining tablespoon of dripping and, when it is shimmering, slide the bubble and squeak back into the pan, uncooked side down, turn the heat down to low and cook for 20 minutes.

Serve with some good butchers' sausages and some apple sauce, preferably while wearing a bowler hat or other symbol of Britishness.

Roast Poblano crema

I live about ten miles from Ely, where there is a cathedral, a very, very good bookshop, and an excellent twice-monthly farmers' market. There are about 30 stalls, and it's a great place to pick up local meats (a slab of belly pork is lurking deliciously in the freezer as we speak) and things like good free-range eggs, pork pies and ostrich products from Bisbrook farm. Because this area is right at the heart of East Anglia's patchwork of farms, the stalls are packed to the gills with interesting fruit and vegetables. The bread in particular tends to run out early - if you do visit Ely for the market, try to get there before 11am.

Edible Ornamentals, a Bedfordshire farm growing chillies, usually has a stall full of chilli plants, pots of sauce and chillies both fresh and dried. I love their chilli sauces (some so hot it's amazing that a glass jar can contain them without dissolving in protest), but their fresh chillies can be downright amazing, and I was delighted to score five big, fresh Poblanos for £3.

Poblanos are the fresh pepper which, when dried, become Ancho and Mulato chillies. (An Ancho is dried more than the slightly soft and fruity Mulato.) They are a mild, purple pepper with a deep, fruity background - lots of flavour and very little heat, although the redder pepper in my bag was a little hotter than the others. I was planning a chilli con carne, and had some Mulatos in the cupboard ready for deployment in that. What better to eat as a side dish than a Poblano crema - those fresh Poblanos roasted, skinned and mixed with crème fraîche, lime and coriander?

To make enough crema to accompany a chilli for two or three, you'll need:

5 fresh Poblano peppers
5 tablespoons crème fraîche (or Mexican crema, if you can find it)
6 spring onions (scallions), chopped
1 large handful chopped coriander
Juice of 1 lime
Salt and pepper
Olive oil

Rub the whole peppers with olive oil and arrange in a baking tray. Cook at 180° C (350° F) for 20 minutes, until the skin is browned and blistering (see picture). Put the whole cooked peppers in a plastic freezer bag, seal the top and put aside for five minutes while you chop the spring onions.

The business with the freezer bag will help the peppers steam from the inside, loosening the skin so you can peel it off easily. When the peppers are cool enough to handle, peel off their skins and discard, then chop open and carefully remove all the seeds. Some people like to do this under a running tap, but I recommend keeping the cooked peppers well away from water to preserve their delicious juices. Slice the silky peeled peppers into long, thin strips and put in a bowl with any juices. (I really enjoy this bit - peeled, roast peppers feel beautiful between the fingers.) Reserve a few strips on a plate to use as a garnish.

Stir the crème fraîche, pepper strips, spring onion and coriander together with the lime juice. Taste, and add salt and pepper. Garnish with more coriander and the reserved peppers, and chill for an hour before serving.

This is deliciously cooling served alongside a chilli con carne - it also makes a fantastic filling for baked potatoes and is gorgeous slopped on a baguette.

Boston baked beans

Home-made Boston baked beans are deliciously, wonderfully, shockingly different from the canned variety. When you try these, you'll wonder just exactly what happened in the long-ago board meeting when Heinz made their plan to pass off their sweetly uninteresting beans as the real thing. There's so much more going on here than a thin tomato slime surrounding stiff little beans. In beans made properly you'll find delicately soft beans in a thick, rich sauce packed with clove-studded onions, herbs like bay and cinnamon, and deeply savoury chunks of ham.

Baked beans want your time and your love. You'll be baking them at a low temperature for six hours, stirring attentively every now and then. Your house will fill up with some really, really good smells. Eat these beans as main course with some good bread, or to accompany a porky barbecue or some pulled pork. This happens to be one of those recipes which improves after a night's refrigeration, which will help the flavours meld to an even deeper degree.

I've used part of a ham I cooked according to this recipe. That ham yielded three meals: the ham itself with fried potatoes, a Pasta alla Medici, and these beans. One of the ingredients in the beans is the liquor the ham cooked in. If you haven't made a ham yourself, or have made a ham to a recipe which doesn't yield a sweet cooking liquid, just replace the 500 ml of sweetened stock with 500 ml cola (not diet). It sounds barking, but it tastes divine.

To make six servings, you'll need:

500 g dried haricot beans
1.5 l water
500 g cooked, smoked ham (recipe here)
500 ml stock from a ham cooked in cola (see above for substitution)
1 large onion
10 cloves
3 bay leaves
1 tablespoon molasses (treacle)
2 tablespoons maple syrup
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 dried chipotle pepper (use any hot chilli pepper if you can't find chipotles)
1 head garlic
1 cinnamon stick
2 teaspoons salt

Put the dried beans in a large bowl and pour the cold water over them. Soak overnight. The next morning, simmer the beans in this water in a covered pan without salt (which will make them tough) until they are soft - about an hour.

Heat the oven to 180° C (350° F). Drain the beans, reserving their soaking liquid, and put them in a heavy casserole dish with a tight-fitting lid. Quarter the onion and press the cloves into it, and chop the garlic. Push the ham, onion, garlic, chilli pepper, bay and cinnamon into the beans, stir in the garlic, then combine 500 ml of the soaking liquid from the beans with 500 ml of the ham's cooking liquid in a jug and stir in the molasses, the maple syrup, the salt and the mustard. Pour this over the bean mixture, put the lid on and put in the oven for six hours.

Stir the beans every hour or so. You'll notice that very gradually, the beans will take on colour and the sauce will thicken. If you think the dish is looking too dry, add some water to the casserole dish - if you reach the last hour of cooking and the mixture is looking wetter than you would like, remove the lid.

The beans will keep in the fridge for over a week, but they're so good that you're very unlikely to be able to keep them in the house for that long without eating them.

Sweet potato and chickpea curry

I like to make a vegetable curry as an accompaniment when I make a meat one, but this curry is substantial and tasty enough to stand up as a meal on its own with rice. This curry is in a southern Indian style, with coconut milk making the curry rich and thick, and lime juice adding zing. It's great for vegetarians - it's loaded with flavour, and will have the meat-eaters fighting among themselves (probably with forks) for a helping too.

I have been lazy in this recipe and haven't made my own curry paste. A good shop-bought curry powder works very well here - as usual, I recommend Bolst's Madras powder, which is really well-balanced and fragrant. To serve four, you'll need:

3 sweet potatoes
2 onions
6 spring onions plus more to garnish
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 inch piece of ginger
4 cloves garlic
1 can chickpeas
1 can coconut milk
1 bird's eye chilli (more if you want a hotter curry)
1 handful chopped coriander leaves
Juice of 1 lime
3 tablespoons oil
Salt to taste

Dice the onions and slice the spring onions, and sauté them in the oil with the curry powder and the coriander, cumin and fennel seeds until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the garlic and ginger, both chopped finely, with the diced and peeled sweet potato and the sliced chilli, and continue to sauté until the sweet potato starts to caramelise and brown a little at the edges.

Pour the coconut milk over the curry, cover and simmer for fifteen minutes, until the sweet potato is soft. Add the drained chickpeas to the pan with half the lime juice and a teaspoon of salt, and simmer for another five minutes. Taste for seasoning - you may want to add more lime. Remove from the heat and stir in the fresh coriander, and garnish with some sliced spring onion.

This curry tastes even better if you leave it in the fridge for a day before reheating and serving. If you do this, add some more fresh coriander when you serve it.

Japanese coleslaw

This coleslaw is very quick and easy to throw together, and it's a great alternative accompaniment for your barbecues. Wasabi and ginger give this coleslaw a great SE Asian kick, and the sweet white cabbage and carrot shreds really respond well to the savoury dressing.

I've used powdered wasabi here, which you can usually find at Asian grocers. It's sweeter and has more zip to it than the pre-prepared version. Check your wasabi packaging to make sure that wasabi (horseradish on some packs) is the only ingredient.

To serve about four people, you'll need:

1 white cabbage
2 large carrots
½ inch piece of ginger
3 tablespoons seasoned Japanese rice vinegar (I like Mitsukan, which you should be able to find at a good supermarket)
1 ½ tablespoons toasted sesame oil
1 ½ tablespoons soy sauce
1 heaped teaspoon wasabi powder
2 teaspoons soft brown sugar

Shred the cabbage finely with a knife, and grate the carrots. Mix the vegetables together in a large bowl.

Add the vinegar to the wasabi in a small bowl, and leave aside for five minutes. Grate the ginger and stir it into the vinegar and wasabi mixture with the soy sauce and sugar, and keep stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Add the sesame oil, whisk briskly to emulsify all the ingredients, and pour the finished dressing over the cabbage and carrots. Toss everything together and serve immediately. This coleslaw does not keep well (the salad will wilt in the dressing), so you have a great excuse to eat it all in one go.

Focaccia with onion and rosemary

My week was brightened no end yesterday when I discovered that Jean-Christophe Novelli was linking to one of the recipes on Gastronomy Domine. I'm cooking a lot of things like the aubergine caviar he mentions at the moment - it must be the weather. To make the most of the short English summer, it's lovely to eat a cold al fresco supper with some good, home-made bread. This explains the bread-making binge I appear to be on at this week. Fresh bread tastes great, it makes the house smell fantastic, and there is something strangely soothing about pummelling the hell out of a wodge of dough as you knead it; not to mention the lovely feeling you get from poking your fingers into a baby-soft, freshly-risen batch to knock it down. Bread dough is deliciously tactile, but I shrink from describing the full puffy, silky, stretchy glory of it in case you all decide I'm some sort of dough pervert.

Focaccia is an Italian bread enriched with plenty of olive oil. The oil in the dough makes it a dream to work with, and although it has a long rising time to help it develop its lovely open texture, all you have to do is knead, then wait for the dough to rise a couple of times. I've flavoured this focaccia with rosemary and chillies stirred into the dough itself, and a caramelised onion topping slathered on top. It's lovely cut into squares and served with some Mediterranean-style cold nibbles like caponata, aubergine caviar, hummus or panzanella, and a bowl of olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dip into.

To make one focaccia you'll need:

Bread
500g strong white bread flour
1 packet instant yeast
275ml tepid water
1 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons olive oil (plus extra for oiling bowl and dough)
5 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary
2 teaspoons Italian chilli flakes

Caramelised onion topping
2 large onions
3 tablespoons olive oil
A few sprigs of rosemary to decorate
12 olives
Olive oil to drizzle and salt to sprinkle over

Put 250g of the flour in a large mixing bowl with the yeast, chopped rosemary and chillies, then pour in the tepid water - this should be around blood heat - and the olive oil. Beat with a wooden spoon until the mixture is smooth, then start to stir in the remaining flour, a handful at a time, until you have a soft dough. The dough should not be completely dry - a little stickiness is fine, and should have vanished by the time you have finished kneading because of the magical development of the gluten in the wheat. You may not find you need to add all the flour - the amount you use will depend on the flour you have bought and the humidity and temperature of your kitchen. (I had about 20g left to put back in the bag when I was done.) Knead the dough vigorously for at least ten minutes, until it is very smooth and stretchy. Oil the dough ball and put it inside an oiled mixing bowl, cover with a damp cloth and leave to rise for two hours in a warm place.

The dough should have more than doubled in size. Knock it down to its original size and knead again for five minutes, then spread it out in a baking tin (mine was 25cm x 35cm), making sure the dough is even and pushed well into the edges and corners. Cover with the damp cloth again and let the focaccia rise for 45 minutes, then push the dough flat again and let it rise for a further 45 minutes while you heat the oven to 220° C (425° F) and prepare the onions by sautéing them in the oil over a low heat until they are sweet and golden (about 20 minutes), then putting them aside to cool.

Push 12 olives into the surface of the risen focaccia in a pattern with some rosemary sprigs, and spread the onions gently over the top (don't push too hard when you spread, so the bread does not deflate). Pour over some more olive oil to fill the olive holes, sprinkle with coarse-grained salt and bake for 20-25 minutes until golden on top, then place on a rack to cool.

Sautéed cauliflower

Ah, the cauliflowers of our youth. I'm sure you remember the buggers: grey and brain-ish, boiled until soft and claggy by the school dinnerladies; or (worse) bobbing up and down in salty water in your Grandma's kitchen sink as a legion of little black insects died in unison and floated out of the florets. They never all vacated the cauliflower - I spent miserable hours at the table with the tip of a knife, digging out wiggly, squashy bodies and things with far too many legs, and smearing them on my napkin.

It took me some years to mentally rehabilitate the cauliflower, and I know plenty of adults who still won't touch the things. Happily, these days you are very, very unlikely to come across an insect-riddled specimen (pesticides are the modern cook's friend), and grey mush is easily avoided if you're cooking them at home. Best of all, it turns out that a cauliflower which is roasted or sautéed is totally delicious. It has a great texture and takes on a sweet and toasty flavour a little like roast chestnuts - nothing at all like the bitter, wet stuff you remember from school. Serve as a side dish or as one of a selection of vegetably nibbles. And if you're low-carbing, which at least two of my friends are at the moment, this is a very tasty way to get your vitamins without carbs.

To saute a head of cauliflower you'll need:

1 cauliflower
Olive oil to cover the bottom of a large saute pan
Salt

(This may be the shortest ingredient list I have ever posted!)

Separate the cauliflower into large florets (see picture) and slice them lengthways so you have flat pieces of cauliflower about a centimetre thick. Heat the oil in the pan until it is shimmering, and slide the cauliflower in. Brown on one side (four or five minutes) before turning carefully and browning on the other side. Serve spread out on a large plate, sprinkled generously with sea salt.

Plantain and sweet potato cake

This is a kind of rösti, which I came up with to accompany some jerked chicken. Plantains are great: they are a cousin of the banana, and look like a giant, green, yellow or creamy version of the things you eat for pudding. Unlike a banana, a plantain is usually served cooked, either when under-ripe, when they are wonderfully starchy, or overripe, when they become sweet.

You can treat an under-ripe (green) plantain much as you would a potato. I've teamed my plantains up with a sweet potato here for some colour and extra sweetness. The allspice here is typically Jamaican, and goes really well with the jerked chicken you'll find on this site.

To serve 3-4 as a side dish, you'll need:

2 large green plantains
1 large sweet potato
1 medium onion
1 ½ teaspoons ground allspice
Butter and oil to fry
Salt and pepper

Peel the plantains by chopping them in half widthways (not lengthways, as you would a banana) and easing the tough skin off. Grate the creamy flesh of the fruit. Peel and grate the sweet potato and the onion. Mix the grated sweet potato, plantain, the onion and allspice and some salt and pepper to taste in a large bowl, and melt a generous amount of oil and butter together in a large, non-stick frying pan until the butter starts to bubble.

Add the plantain and sweet potato mixture to the pan and pack it down so you have a thick pancake. Fry over a medium heat for ten minutes, then put a large plate over the pan and turn the whole arrangement upside-down, so the pancake ends up crispy side up on the plate. Return the pan to the heat, add more oil and butter and slide the pancake in, uncooked side downwards, and fry for another ten minutes. Serve piping hot.

Roast asparagus with shaved parmesan

If you thought the hollandaise sauce recipe from the other day sounded like too much hard work, this asparagus recipe will suit you down to the ground. It's very quick and easy, and this cooking method makes the most of the tender sweetness of the stems. It also looks posh, so you can serve it up as a starter (or as an accompaniment) to guests and feel smug when they congratulate you on something which, in reality, only took you five minutes to put together.

For a starter, look at serving between six and eight stalks of asparagus per person. You can get away with less than this if you're making it to accompany something else as a main course, but it's worth making plenty because roast asparagus is downright delicious.

To serve two as a starter you'll need:

16 stalks of asparagus, as fresh as possible
½ teaspoon flaked Italian chilli peppers
Zest of a lemon
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
50g parmesan cheese
Salt (preferably something crystalline, like Maldon) and pepper

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Snap the bottoms off the stems of asparagus. They'll come apart naturally, with a lovely snapping sound, at the point where the woody part (which you don't want to eat) begins. Arrange them in a single layer in a baking dish.

Sprinkle the flaked chilli and lemon zest over the asparagus, and drizzle with the olive oil. Roast the asparagus in the oven for 10-15 minutes until bright green.

While the asparagus is roasting, use a potato peeler to shave the parmesan into little pieces. As soon as the asparagus comes out of the oven, scatter over the parmesan, which should soften a little as it meets the hot asparagus. Serve the roast asparagus with crusty bread if you're eating it as a starter.

Fennel salad

This is so easy - just slice and bung on a plate - that I hesitate to call it a recipe. Let's call it an assembly.

A fennel bulb has an aniseedy, aromatic taste. Its flavour is very smooth, with no hint of acid to lift it, so I like to add some lemon juice whether I'm roasting it or eating it raw. It's a lovely, underused vegetable - try making this very quick salad next time you have a pizza. It's a great accompaniment to tomato-rich foods.

To serve two, you'll need:

1 fennel bulb
1 shallot
1 small handful parsley
Juice of half a lemon
3 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper

Slice the fennel bulb into thin rings, and arrange to cover a plate. Reserve the herby tops of the bulbs. Slice the shallot finely and separate into rings. Lay these on top of the fennel. Squeeze over the lemon juice and drizzle the olive oil over, sprinkle over salt and a generous amount of pepper, then leave at room temperature for at least half an hour for the flavours to meld. Just before serving, garnish with the reserved fennel tops and the parsley.

Celeriac purée

These days, few of the vegetables you'll find in the supermarket are truly seasonal. We've got year-round mange tout peas (I remember the days when my parents grew them in the garden - the season only lasted for about about a month, but my, were we sick of peas at the end of that month); year-round broccoli and year-round cauliflower. Spring cabbage appears in the shops in summer, autumn and winter, and out-of-season asparagus is there whenever you want it. It doesn't taste of anything, but if you want it, it's there.

Happily for those outraged by man's twisting of nature, here are a few season-specific things that you won't find all year round. Some English root vegetables in particular are only easy to find in the winter (for the most part - there's always bound to be someone bussing turnips in from Australia in high summer), and they're wonderful in the cold months. It makes sense really - these roots are the energy store of the plants, and so they're full of sugars and other nutrients.

Celeriac is one of my favourite winter roots. It's the taproot of a celery plant (not the same one you use to dip in your hummus or to stir your Bloody Mary), but tastes much richer, deeper, creamier and sweeter than celery. I know people who can't bear celery, but who will happily munch on celeriac; they're really very different flavours. This vegetable isn't readily found outside Europe, but if you are an American reader and happen upon one in a market, snap it up so you can impress your friends with your cosmopolitan cooking.

Although modern 'best before' stickers tend to suggest you can only keep your celeriac for a week or so, the root will actually keep in the fridge for a month or so if wrapped in plastic to keep it nice and humid- inside your fridge it is dark and cold, which fools the root into thinking it's still underground - the celeriac won't be any the worse for it.

The celeriac is a knobbly, rough-skinned vegetable, and its flesh is very hard. Make sure you have a very sharp knife to remove all the skin and nubbly bits, and to cut through the solid root. It makes a lovely soup (which I really ought to blog some time), and it's great raw in coleslaw. One of the very nicest of French crudités is simply grated raw celeriac blended with a little home-made mayonnaise. But for my money, one of the best things you can do with a chunk of celeriac is to cook it until soft, mash it with a little potato, push the resulting mixture through a sieve and whip it with butter and cream for a very fine and rich side dish.

To make celeriac purée as an accompaniment for four, you'll need:

1 large celeriac, about 20 cm in diameter (anything larger than this may be a bit woody)
2 medium potatoes (choose a variety which is good for mashing)
100 ml double cream
2 heaping tablespoons salted butter
2 level teaspoons salt (plus more to taste)

Using a very sharp knife, peel the celeriac and cut it into 2 cm square chunks. As soon as you have cut a piece, put it in a saucepan of cold water to stop it from oxidising and turning brown. Peel the potatoes and cut them into chunks about twice the size of the celeriac pieces, and add them to the pan. Warm a mixing/serving bowl.

Bring the potatoes and celeriac to the boil, put the lid on the pan and simmer for 15 minutes. Poke the vegetables with a fork to check they are soft (if they are not, cook for another 5 minutes). Drain and use a potato masher to mash the celeriac and potatoes until they are as even as you can manage.

Melt the butter and cream together in a milk pan, and bring to a very low simmer as you sieve the purée.

Push the mashed mixture through a sieve using the back of a ladle. You can also use a mouli or food mill if you have one. The resulting purée will be extremely smooth. Put the purée into the warmed bowl and use a hand whisk to whip the butter and cream mixture into the purée with the salt, and serve immediately. This is particularly good with rich meat dishes and roasts.

Mexican squash and corn cream

Do try this one - it's seriously good and has worked its way up to being a frequent star alongside my roast dinners. This silky, sweet puree works unbelievably well as an accompaniment, especially with poultry - I hope some of you will try it with your Christmas turkey. It's rich and packed with flavour; and like many recipes which utilise creamed corn, it's a favourite with children. It also works as a great quick main dish (and is lovely if you're entertaining vegetarians - try it over rice with an interesting salad).

Butternut squash originates in Mexico, and it has an affinity for other Mexican ingredients like the corn, the coriander and the chillies. I've used crème fraîche here to loosen the mixture - an authentic Mexican dish might use crema, the thick, Mexican, sour cream, but really the difference between the two products is minuscule. If you can't find smoky ground chipotle chillies where you are, just substitute your favourite crushed, dried chillies or chilli powder.

To serve two as a main dish or about four (depending on greed) as a side dish, you'll need:

1 butternut squash
1 can creamed corn
3 heaped tablespoons crème fraîche
1 tablespoon salted butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¾ teaspoon ground chipotle chilli
1 large handful roughly chopped coriander

Peel the squash (you'll find a serrated knife the best tool for this job - that peel is tough), remove the seeds and stringy pith, and chop the flesh into pieces about an inch square. Cover with water and simmer for 15 minutes until the pieces of squash are tender and soft when poked with a knife.

Drain the water off and return the squash pieces to the pan. Add the corn, butter and crème fraîche to the pan and mash with a potato masher off the heat until smooth. Season with the salt, pepper and chillies - you'll find this dish will require quite a lot of salt for maximum flavour because of the natural sweetness of the vegetables.

Return the pan to a low heat and bring to a gentle simmer. Remove from the heat again and stir in the coarsely chopped coriander. Serve immediately.

This squash and corn cream freezes well.

Onion rings

If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, these things are gastronomic Viagra. These onion rings have sweet, tender middles and a fantastically crisp coating. I use a tiny amount of parmesan cheese in the breading, which doesn't give the onion rings a cheesy taste, but does make them deeply savoury and helps create the excellent colour. Cornmeal (rough polenta) gives them a wonderful crunch, and rice flour a pleasing crispiness.

Rice flour is a useful ingredient to keep in the kitchen. It's usually available in Indian and Chinese grocers, and it has one very useful property - coatings made with it stay crisp even after the food has cooled. This makes it invaluable for summer picnics, when you can make breaded chicken, cool it on a rack, pop it in some Tupperware, drag it in a knapsack over miles of public footpath and take it out hours later, still crispy. These onion rings were never going to get the chance to go cold, but they do benefit from the delicate crisp you get from rice flour.

I always use a wok and a jam thermometer for deep frying; this way, you get through much less oil, and can easily control the temperature. When we finally get around to remodelling the kitchen and I have a bit more room to play with, I may end up buying a machine for deep frying; but deep frying is a cooking method I only use about five times a year, so I'm not completely convinced it's worth the money and the counter space.

You'll probably have some breading mixture left over. Just pop it in a bag and freeze it - you'll find you can use it directly from the freezer on another occasion.

To make onion rings to serve four (or fewer, depending on greed), you'll need:

2 large onions (buy the biggest ones you can find)
5 heaped tablespoons cornmeal (coarse polenta)
5 heaped tablespoons rice flour
3 tablespoons finely grated parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon Madras curry powder
1 teaspoon salt
Milk to soak
Flavourless oil to deep fry

Slice the onions into thin rings (about half a centimetre thick). Set the oil to heat. Mix the cornmeal, rice flour, parmesan, curry powder and salt in a large bowl.

Separate the rings out. Dip each ring first into the milk, then dredge them in the breading mixture. Drop the rings into the hot oil (your thermometer should have a 'deep fry' marking on it - otherwise, use a machine) in small batches, and fry for about two minutes, until golden brown. Remove to a tray lined with kitchen paper in a single layer, and keep the tray warm in a very, very low oven while you cook the rest of the rings.

I served these with a steak (on which I'd used Paul Prudhomme's Magic Blackened Steak blend - a hearty recommendation here if you can get hold of some) and mashed potatoes.

Sweet potato and halloumi sauté

Sweet potato is a great winter ingredient - all that sugar and gorgeous colour make for a really uplifting meal. The tuber is so packed with sweetness that cooking it in this way will make the edges catch and caramelise in the butter, leaving each soft little cube with a coating that's halfway between chewy and crisp. Alongside the salty halloumi, this mixture of textures and flavours is a real winner.

This dish makes a really tasty main course for vegetarians. I also like it as a side dish with some good sausages. The magic in this is all in the spicing - it's worth taking the time to set to the spices with a mortar and pestle until they're really well blended (you can also use a coffee grinder) - whatever method you choose, make sure that the anise and cloves in particular are well-pulverised, because neither ingredient is good to bite down on in large chunks. You'll end up making more spice mixture than you need, but I view this as a time-saver; just pack the extra mixture into a freezer bag and pop it in the freezer. Next time you come to cook this dish, you can use the mixture directly from the freezer.

To serve four as a side dish or two as a main course, you'll need:

1 sweet potato
1 block halloumi
1 large shallot
1 clove garlic
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 teaspoon flaked chillies
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 'petal' star anise
3 cloves
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon chopped parsley

Take the cumin, fennel seeds, chillies, cinnamon, onion salt, anise and cloves, and grind them thoroughly in a mortar and pestle or coffee grinder. Peel the sweet potato and cut it into large dice, about the size of the top joint of your thumb. Sprinkle two teaspoons of the spice mixture over the sweet potato pieces and toss well until they are coated. Cut the halloumi into dice the same size as the sweet potato pieces and dice the shallot finely.

Heat the butter in a non-stick frying pan over a medium-low heat (make sure you use a non-stick pan or this dish will stick like glue) until it starts to foam, and tip in the spiced sweet potato. Sauté gently, turning the pieces every few minutes, until the sweet potato is soft all the way through (about 20 minutes).

Turn the heat up a notch and add the shallots and a crushed clove of garlic to the pan. Stir well to distribute the shallots and garlic around the pan, then add the halloumi, making sure that all the halloumi pieces are in contact with the bottom of your pan. Cook for another five minutes without stirring, turn the halloumi pieces and continue to sauté for another five minutes. The shallots should be brown and a little gummy, and the halloumi should be seared a golden colour where it's been in contact with the pan.

Turn out into a heated serving dish and garnish with parsley.