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.

Tuna and borlotti bean salad

This salad is brilliant at barbecues, where it's a great light, sunshine-filled alternative to any giant hunks of charred meat you might be serving. It's full of assertive flavours - the lemon, deliciously sweet peppers and raw onion, the celery and, of course, the tuna. It's also very simple, and only takes a few minutes to throw together.

I'm a lazy cook. I very, very seldom cook beans from scratch - they're very cheap to buy in cans, and in a salad like this the borlotti beans don't suffer at all from coming out of a tin. If you prefer to use dried beans, you'll need to soak them overnight, then boil for ten minutes. Take the pan off the heat and leave the beans to soak in their cooking water for two hours. Borlotti beans are a lovely little legume. They're related to the kidney bean, and they have a lovely creamy texture and a slightly sweet taste. If you can't find any, try making this with cannellini beans, which make a good alternative. To make a large bowl, big enough for a large family barbecue, you'll need:

2 cans tuna in spring water
1 large sweet onion (a Vidalia or other sweet salad onion is excellent in this dish)
1 handful fresh parsley
1 plump clove garlic
1 can borlotti beans
5 stalks from a celery heart
1 orange pepper
4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Juice of ½ a lemon
Salt and pepper

Chop the onion into quarters and slice finely. Mince the parsley and cut the celery and pepper into small dice. Crush the garlic and flake the tuna. Put the beans in a sieve and rinse them under cold running water.

Toss all the prepared ingredients together in a large bowl with the olive oil, lemon and seasoning, and cover with cling film. Leave in the fridge for an hour before serving for the flavours to mingle.

Provençale roast lamb with flageolet beans

Spring is finally here in Cambridgeshire. In celebration of the fact that some of my bulbs are finally flowering, I thought I'd eat a dear little fluffy baa-lamb.

This recipe is wonderful for this time of year, when the sun is bright and there's a jug of tulips on the windowsill. The herbs and sweet tomatoes are a real foretaste of summer. Enjoy this with a cold glass of white wine, or a pint of real ale.

To serve two, you'll need:

½ a shoulder of lamb
100g tin flageolet beans, drained
10 small tomatoes
6 cloves garlic
1 glass white wine
1 tablespoon tomato puree
1 teaspoon Marigold vegetable bouillon
A few stems of rosemary
A few stems of thyme
4 teaspoons quince jelly (use redcurrant if you can't get hold of quince)
1 handful parsley
1 handful oregano

Begin by making little slits in the skin of the lamb - six to a half-shoulder will be plenty. Stuff each resulting pocket with a quarter of a clove of garlic and a sprig of rosemary. (You may want to leave the knife in the slit and twist it to fit the garlic and rosemary into the hole.) Slice the rest of the garlic finely. Sprinkle the skin of the lamb with salt.

Quarter the tomatoes, and mix them with the the remaining rosemary and garlic and the rest of the ingredients in a heavy baking tray. Place the lamb on top, skin side up, and roast for an hour and twenty minutes at 180°C.

While the lamb is roasting, finely chop the parsley and oregano, and combine it half of it with two teaspoons of the quince jelly and a large pinch of salt. Remove the lamb from the oven and smear the herb paste all over the skin. Stir the other two teaspoons of quince jelly and the rest of the herbs into the beans around the lamb, and return to the oven for ten minutes, until glossy and beautiful.

The beans will have soaked up the juices from the tomatoes and meat, becoming sticky, rich and packed with flavour. You should be left with some meat for tomorrow's sandwiches - the beans are also delicious cold.