Chicken with morels

Rummaging in my kitchen cupboards last week, I had a very pleasant surprise - I found a pot of dried morel mushrooms which I'd bought last year and forgotten about. Morels are an utterly delicious mushroom, with a honeycomb-textured cap and a subtle and delicate flavour, much less musky than some other wild mushrooms. They can be very expensive, but it's worth shopping around: I found mine in a shop in Nice last year, where they were cheaper than they are in the UK.

The morel season is short, so you're most likely to be able to find them dried. (If you see them fresh anywhere, snap them up; a fresh morel is a thing of wonder.) Some people out there take morels very seriously - The Great Morel is just one of a number of websites dedicated to this fabulous little fungus, and is well worth a browse.

I chose to make a chicken dish to show my morels off to their best advantage. You don't require any complicated spicing here -with the crème fraîche and white wine in the sauce, the morels make this a velvety-rich dish with exceptional flavour. To serve two, you'll need:

2 plump chicken breasts, with skins
8 large dried morel mushrooms
3 shallots
2 fat cloves garlic
1 glass white wine
100ml water
5 tablespoons home-made chicken stock
3 heaped tablespoons crème fraîche
Juice of half a lemon
1 handful fresh chervil
2 heaped tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and pepper

Soak the dried morels in 100ml of freshly boiled water for half an hour. If you're lucky enough to get your hands on fresh morels, skip this step, and replace the soaking liquid later in the recipe with chicken stock. (If your morels are not as large as those in the picture above, feel free to use a few more.) Dice the shallots and chop the garlic.

Melt the butter and olive oil in a sauté pan, and heat over a medium flame until the butter starts to bubble. Slide the chicken breasts in, skin side down, and cook for about seven minutes, until the skin is golden. Turn the chicken over and add the diced shallots and the garlic to the oil in the pan. Move the shallots and garlic around in the pan with a spatula until the shallots are turning translucent, then add the morels, reserving their soaking liquid, and continue to sauté for two minutes.

Pour the mushrooms' soaking liquid (being careful to avoid any gritty bits at the bottom of the bowl) and the wine around the chicken with five tablespoons of home-made chicken stock. The sauce in the pan should simmer - allow it to bubble down and evaporate until you have less than a third of the volume of liquid that you started with. Stir in the crème fraîche and simmer for another minute. The sauce should be glossy. Add the lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste.

Garnish with the chervil and serve with mashed potatoes, which you can use to mop up the gorgeous sauce, and a green vegetable.

Spicy barbecue chicken wings

I've been barbecuing a lot in the last couple of weeks, as the UK has sunburned its way through a heat wave. Recently I've been experimenting with old-fashioned barbecue sauce, and I think I've finally come up with a pretty much world-beating home-made version. (Of course, any recipe which starts with eight tablespoons of ketchup can barely be called a recipe - but I hope you'll let me off this time.) This is a great marinade and baste, and is thick enough to stay on the wings as they cook. If you baste well during cooking, it will caramelise into a dense, sticky-crispy layer on the skin, making wings just aching to be torn apart with fingers and popped into your mouth.

Chicken wings are one of the best things in the world on the barbecue. The flesh is succulent and sweet because of the proximity to the bone, they cook (and marinade) faster than a larger joint would, and all that lovely skin crisps up to a mahogany deliciousness. To marinade ten chicken wings, tips removed, you'll need:

8 tablespoons tomato ketchup
2 tablespoons sweet chilli sauce (use your favourite - I like Kampong Koh or Sriracha)
4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 crushed garlic cloves
2 tablespoons muscavado sugar
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons Tabasco chipotle sauce
2 teaspoons ground chipotle peppers (use ground cayenne if you can't find chipotle)
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons liquid smoke

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and marinade the chicken wings for about eight hours. (You can cut down on this with a vacuum container like a SealSaver, which is what I did.) Cook on the barbecue (or under the grill indoors if the weather is bad), which should not be blistering hot, for 15 minutes, turning regularly and basting each time you turn with the remaining marinade.

A note on the balsamic vinegar: don't use the best stuff that you keep for salads. A cheaper version will do here. I like Aspall's balsamic for cooking. Maille also do a very good balsamic vinegar, but I've not seen it outside France - if anyone knows of any stockists here, please leave a note in the comments!

Jerked chicken - and brining 101

I promised you a post about brining. Brining sounds a bit counter-intuitive at first; how on earth is giving a piece of meat a bath in salty water going to make it taste better?

Back in the dark ages when I was at school, cooking lessons were called domestic science. I am unconvinced that there's a lot in common between my constructing a pie and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, but understanding how brining works does actually require you to think back to your biology lessons. This is because what's going on in your chicken once you've popped it in its salty bath involves osmosis, whereby the cell walls in the muscle let through the concentrated brine to try to balance the concentration inside and outside the cells. This results in a plumping of the muscle - the cells draw up the brine all the way into the core of the piece of meat and become very juicy, leaving you with a lovely moist piece of cooked meat. There's also some denaturing of protein thanks to the salt; this will make your meat much more tender. All this science works at its fastest and best when your brine is as close to freezing as possible - once you've made yours, refrigerate it (perhaps with a couple of ice cubes bobbing around in there) until it's very cold before using.

The brine can also push certain flavours deep inside the meat (far deeper than ordinary marinading can achieve). When choosing what flavours to add to your brine, be careful - you need to use only those aromatics which are soluble in water or vinegar, not those (like the essential oils in a lot of herbs and spices) which are only fat-soluble - these flavours won't make it past the cell membranes. Any of those chilli sauces which have a vinegar base (Tabasco, Frank's and so on) work brilliantly in a brine; so does lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, mustard, flavoured vinegars and any alcohol. Be careful when adding wine or cider to a brine though; because the brine works on the deep tissue of the meat, not just the surface, it can be hard to cook the brined meat little enough to keep it tender while also cooking it enough to burn off any alcohol lurking deep in the middle.

I like sugar or honey in a brine, especially with chicken, because as well as adding flavour to the meat, it makes the surface skin much nicer - brown, crisp and quick to caramelise. You can add another variable by buying some vacuum containers like the ones I reviewed here, which will make brining about four times faster. Without a handy vacuum tub, brining times for chicken are:

• Chicken breasts, no bone - 1 hr
• Chicken joints, with bone - 1 ½ hrs
• Whole chicken (about 4lb) - 3 hrs
  

I've made a jerk rub to slather all over chicken once it comes out of the brine. This Jamaican seasoning is unusual in its heavy use of allspice, usually a dessert spice, and it works really well here. To make unbelievably succulent, spicy chicken for two, you'll need:

Chicken and brine
1 chicken, jointed into six pieces (ask the butcher to do this for you or go at it yourself with a very sharp cleaver)
70 g salt
1 litre water
1 ½ tablespoons Tabasco sauce
2 tablespoons honey

Jerk seasoning
2 tablespoons ground allspice
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
1 tablespoon paprika
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon dried habañero pepper
1 teaspoon black pepper

Mix the water, salt, Tabasco and honey and heat gently in a saucepan, stirring, until all the salt has dissolved. Chill in a large bowl in the fridge until very cold. Add the chicken pieces to the brine and leave for an hour and a half.

Remove the chicken from the brine and pat dry with paper towels. Drizzle with a little olive oil and rub well with the jerk seasoning. Grill the chicken on the barbecue or under the grill in your oven for about 7 minutes per side (be careful here - for some reason, brined chicken takes less time to cook than virgin chicken).

I'll put up a recipe later this week for a plantain accompaniment for this chicken.

Lemon-pepper crispy chicken with tomato sauce

Lemons. Tomatoes. Lots and lots of basil. Who said it was February?

I really love a good breading mixture. This one's just great - it's seasoned with lemon zest and freshly ground pepper, so it's really fresh and zingy. I'm sure there are non-fried things just as crispy and delicious as this, but I've yet to find out what they are.

To serve four, you'll need:

Chicken
4 chicken breasts, without skins
8 tablespoons olive oil (choose a really fruity one)
Juice of ½ a lemon
1 clove of garlic, crushed
½ teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 eggs, beaten
250g breadcrumbs
Grated zest of a lemon
1 teaspoon chilli flakes

Sauce
1.5 kg fresh ripe tomatoes
3 large onions
4 cloves of garlic
1 handful fresh basil
1 handful fresh oregano
1 mild red chilli
1 ½ tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons sugar
1 large knob butter, plus extra to taste
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and pepper

Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and marinade it overnight in the olive oil, lemon juice, salt garlic and ten turns of the peppermill.

Here comes the tedious bit - peel and seed the tomatoes. (This is very easy but takes a while - use a knife to make a little cross in the skin at the bottom of the tomato, then pour over boiling water and leave for ten seconds. Fish the tomato out with a slotted spoon. You'll find the skin will come away easily. Slice open to remove the seeds.) Chop the tomato flesh and set aside in a bowl. If you are pressed for time, use tinned tomatoes. They won't be quite as good, but they'll still be pretty darn tasty.

Dice the onions and chop the garlic finely, and fry in a large knob of butter until translucent and fragrant. Add the tomatoes and finely chopped chilli to the saucepan and stir to combine everything. Bring to a very low simmer, and reduce (this will take more than an hour) to half its original volume or a little less. Bring the vinegar and sugar to the boil in a small pan and stir it into the sauce. Add the oregano and season with salt and pepper. Taste to check whether you need more salt or sugar. Add another knob of butter for a more mellow flavour if you like.

Combine the breadcrumbs, lemon zest, chilli flakes and a tablespoon of freshly ground pepper in a large bowl. When the sauce is nearly reduced, bread the chicken by removing the pieces from the marinade, dipping in the beaten egg, and rolling in the breadcrumb mixture until each piece is nicely coated with the crumbs and aromatics. Heat a large knob of butter and three tablespoons of olive oil together in a non-stick frying pan, and slide the breaded chicken pieces in when the oil is very hot. Cook for about 5 minutes each side, until the chicken is golden and crisp.

Serve the chicken and its tomato sauce with buttered tagliatelle or some basmati rice mixed with a knob of butter and a small handful of parmesan.

Sage and onion roast chicken with gravy and crispy sage leaves

I've been experimenting with roast chickens. You'll notice that the method here is rather different from other roast chicken recipes on this site; this time I'm getting you to stuff a buttery mixture under the skin and then blast the chicken at a very high temperature for a much shorter cooking time than usual. I'm amazed at the difference this makes to the finished product. The skin is crisp and flavourful - absolutely the best I've ever achieved on a roast bird - and the flesh is incredibly juicy and moist, taking on flavour from the butter, herb and shallot mixture, but requiring no basting or turning upside-down and juggling in the oven.

I had a great email conversation over Christmas with an American gentleman in Japan who was wondering about typically English flavours to cook his Christmas goose with. Sage and onion is one of the classic English mixtures, and here it goes to make a boring old chicken really festive. I'd be very happy serving this as a Christmas dinner for people who (like me) don't go a bundle on turkey. The gravy here is also typically English - it's thickened with flour and makes a lovely, glossy, boozy glaze for the meat. I served a side of mashed potato with this to soak up lots of the gravy (because mashed potato and gravy is one of the best things in the world, right up there with sex and roller coasters), some easy stuffing balls to reflect the sage and onion flavours, and a really tart salad to cut through all the lovely butter.

To roast one chicken weighing about three pounds (around 1.5 kg), which should serve three or four, you'll need:

Chicken
1 chicken
1 lemon
2 small (round) shallots or 1 large (banana) shallot
125 g (¼ lb) softened salted butter
12 fresh sage leaves
2 medium onions
Salt and pepper

Gravy
1½ dessert spoons flour
1 small glass dry white wine
100 ml chicken stock

Sage leaves
8 sage leaves
Olive oil to fry


Chicken method
Preheat the oven to a blistering 230°C (450° F). Dice the shallots as finely as possible - think micro-dice - using your sharpest knife, and combine them thoroughly in a bowl with the zest of the lemon, a teaspoon of salt and the butter. Use your fingers and the back of a teaspoon to separate the skin over the breast of the chicken from the muscle, starting at the bottom (leg) end of the bird, where the cavity opens. You should be able to make a large pocket between skin and flesh over each breast. Use fingers to stuff this pocket with all but two teaspoons of the soft butter, then slide six whole sage leaves under the skin as well, on top of the butter mixture. Push the remaining two teaspoons of butter and two more sage leaves into the space where the chicken's legs meet the body.

Chop the zested lemon in half and slice the onions roughly. Remove any lumps of fat from inside the chicken and discard. Push half the lemon and half an onion into the chicken's cavity with four more sage leaves and some salt and pepper. Make a pile of the onion pieces in the centre of your roasting tin and balance the chicken on top, then rain another teaspoon of salt all over the skin of the bird and roast for an hour.

When the hour is up, use a skewer to poke into the fattest part of the chicken's thigh. If the juices run clear, remove from the oven; if there is any pinkness, return the bird to the oven for another ten minutes and repeat. Remove the chicken to a warmed platter and leave it in a warm place to rest for ten minutes while you make the gravy and the crispy sage leaves.

Gravy method
Pour any juices from the cavity of the chicken into a small frying pan over a medium flame, along with all the fat, juices and onion bits from the roasting tin. Do not discard any of the flavourful butter and fat from the roasting tin - if you feel guilty after having overdone it at Christmas, go for a run tomorrow rather than deprive yourself of flavour here.

Bring the contents of the pan up to a gentle simmer, and sprinkle over the flour. Use a wooden spoon, making tiny circles in the pan, to work the flour into the fatty mixture until no floury lumps are visible. (There will be onion pieces and bits of chicken kicking around in there - these are fine; you just don't want any floury bits.)

The liquid in the pan will start to thicken dramatically. Pour over the glass of wine and continue to stir for a couple of minutes to burn off the alcohol. Pour in the chicken stock and continue to stir for a couple more minutes, then taste for seasoning. Tip in any juices which the chicken has released while resting, and get someone to start carving.

Sage leaves method
These are as easy as anything. Just heat the oil in a little pan and throw in the sage leaves for a few seconds. They will frizzle and crisp. Drain on kitchen paper and sprinkle over the carved chicken.

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!

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.

Honey-mustard roast chicken

This is a very easy and totally delicious way to roast a chicken. The honey-mustard baste keeps the flesh moist and plump, and dribbles into a bed of roast onions which caramelises to a sticky sweetness. The skin on a chicken cooked like this is fantastic - crisp and honeyed with a lovely zing from the baste.

To roast one medium chicken you'll need:

1 roasting chicken
1 lemon
5 onions
1 handful fresh parsley
1 tablespoon soya sauce
1 heaped tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 heaped tablespoon whole-grain mustard (I used Grey Poupon)
2 heaped tablespoons honey

Preheat the oven to 190° C (357° F).

Remove any excess fat from the inside of the chicken and discard. Zest the lemon and put the zest aside in a bowl, then slice the lemon in half and push it into the cavity of the chicken with one halved onion and the parsley. Chop the remaining onions roughly and use them to make a little mound to stand the chicken on in the bottom of your roasting tin.

Add the soya sauce, both mustards and the honey to the lemon zest in the bowl and mix well. Put two tablespoons of the mixture inside the chicken and place the bird on top of the onions. Smear another two tablespoons over the outside of the bird. (Don't worry about making sure the baste gets on the onion base - it will drizzle over them in just the right quantity as you baste the chicken.)

Cover the chicken with foil and place in the oven for 1 hour and 15 minutes, basting with a little of the honey-mustard mix every twenty minutes or so. After the 1 hour and 15 minutes, remove the tin foil from the bird and turn the heat up to 210° C (410° F). Continue to cook for another 15 minutes, checking that the skin browns but does not char (keep an eye on it and replace the tin foil if you feel it's getting too brown). Remove from the oven, rest for ten minutes (the chicken will produce lots of savoury juices) and serve with the roast onions from the bottom of the pan, roast potatoes and a green vegetable.

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 Kiev

This is a rather special Chicken Kiev. It has a super-crisp coating and is bursting with a garlic butter full of extra flavours. (You will notice that I am overdosing a little on saffron rice at the moment. It's lovely with chicken dishes - just cook your rice as usual, but add a large pinch of saffron, which you've soaked in an eggcup of water from the kettle for twenty minutes, with the rest of the cooking water.)

The flavoured butter carefully packed inside this chicken (and balancing cheekily on top of that lovely saffron rice) is worth making in bulk and keeping in the freezer. You can slice it direct from the frozen roll and use it to melt over steaks, to baste roast chickens, to flavour couscous, to fill a baked potato, and anywhere you need rich flavour and lovely moist butteryness. If roasting the garlic for the butter is just too much faff for you, use an extra three cloves of raw garlic instead.

Use the largest chicken breasts you can find for this recipe; this will make it much easier to keep the pool of butter inside the bird until you cut it on your plate. Waitrose is currently selling a chicken called the Poulet d'Or - a massive and delicious behemoth of a bird which grows slowly (and ethically, at Leckford Farm, an enterprise owned by Waitrose's parent company) - it's fed an organic, corn-rich diet, allowed to forage and roam free, and is slaughtered at around 90 days rather than the usual four weeks. It's a big bird, but it's tender and extremely flavourful - I've read comparisons to Poulet de Bresse, and for special occasions I will be very happy to spend the £12 again on two breasts. (A whole bird comes in at about twice that price, but I'd estimate that it would very happily feed six people, so the effective price is high but not unreasonable.)

To make half a pound of garlic and herb butter, and two Chicken Kievs, you'll need:

Garlic and herb butter
1 pat of good, salted butter (2 sticks in America), plus a tablespoon of butter to roast the garlic
1 head of garlic (to roast)
3 cloves of garlic (to be kept raw)
2 bay leaves
1 large sprig thyme
1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon
1 tablespoon chopped fresh chervil (leave this out if you can't find any)
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
1 fresh red chilli
½ teaspoon paprika
Juice and zest of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon light soya sauce
Large pinch of salt

Chicken
2 large chicken breasts, skinned and boned
Crumbs from two slices of white bread (blend in a food processor to make crumbs)
An equal volume of polenta or cornmeal
5 tablespoons grated parmesan
4 extra tablespoons polenta or cornmeal
2 eggs, beaten
Salt and pepper
1 teaspoon chilli flakes

Start by roasting the garlic for the butter. Slice the bulb of garlic in half across its equator and put the tablespoon of butter, the bay leaves and the thyme on the cut side of the bottom half, seasoning generously. Place the top half of the garlic bulb on top, making a herby sandwich. Roast at 180° C for 40 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool.

Pop the soft, roast cloves of garlic out into the food processor, and add the raw garlic; the tarragon, parsley, chervil and basil; the chilli and paprika; the lemon zest and juice; and the soya sauce. Drop in the half pound of butter and blend until everything is amalgamated and finely chopped into the butter.

Make a long sausage of the flavoured butter on a piece of tin foil. Wrap tightly and place in the freezer for at least an hour.

When the butter has chilled, start on the chicken. Begin by combining the breadcrumbs and an equal volume of polenta in one bowl with the parmesan and chilli flakes. Put the four tablespoons of polenta in a separate bowl, and beat the eggs in a final bowl.

Take your smallest knife. Sharpen it vigorously. Use it to make a slit down the side of one chicken breast, creating a pocket inside the muscle. Be very careful not to cut all the way through. Remove the little fillet strip from underneath the breast and set it to one side.

Slice a disc of butter from the frozen butter sausage and tuck it inside the pocket. You may be able to fit more than one disc in, but be careful not to overstuff the breast, or the butter will leak out in cooking. If the butter sticks out at all, just trim it carefully so it's firmly inside the meaty pocket.

Dip the fillet strip in the polenta, then back in the egg. Dip the chicken breast in the polenta, then the egg, and sprinkle the area where the slit is with a bit of extra polenta. Use the polenta and egg to glue the fillet strip around the slit. Roll the whole sticky assembly in the breadcrumbs mixture, patting plenty on around the slit/fillet area to make a good seal and ensuring everything is covered well. Repeat the process with the other breast.

Heat two tablespoons of butter and two of olive oil in a heavy, large frying pan. Bring the pan to a high temperature and carefully slide the chicken pieces in, slit/fillet area facing down. Turn the heat down to just below medium and leave the chicken breasts for 15 minutes, without poking or moving. After 15 minutes, flip them over (the bottoms will have turned an amazing golden crisp) and leave for another 15 minutes. Serve immediately. The melted butter will have formed a delicious pool inside the chicken breasts, and will pool out when you slice into the meat with your knife. Make sure you have plenty of rice to soak it all up.

Chicken and sweetcorn soup

This Chinese soup is a real favourite with children, and it's pleasingly economical to make. You'll only need two chicken leg joints (the joint with the thigh and drumstick attached) to serve four people.

You might have eaten this in Chinese restaurants. This is an egg-drop soup: this means it's thickened by whisking a thin stream of beaten egg into the bubbling stock immediately before serving, leaving you with delicious strands of seasoned egg mingling with the chicken pieces and the sweetcorn. If you want to make extra to freeze, skip the egg stage, adding it to the defrosted soup immediately before you serve.

To serve four, you'll need:

2 chicken leg joints
1 litre water
1 chicken stock cube
1 piece of ginger, about the size of your thumb, cut into coins
2 spring onions (plus extra to garnish)
3 cloves garlic
1 can creamed corn
2 tablespoons soya sauce
1 teaspoon cornflour
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 eggs
Salt and pepper

Brown the outside of the chicken pieces in a large, heavy saucepan with the garlic, spring onions and ginger for five minutes. Pour over the water and a tablespoon of soya sauce, and crumble the stock cube into the pan. Bring up to a gentle simmer and keep over a medium heat for half an hour, skimming any froth off the top of the stock as you go.

Remove the chicken from the pan, and use a knife and fork to remove all the meat from the bones, chopping it into small pieces. Set the meat aside and return the bones and skin to the stock, and simmer for another half hour.

Strain the stock through a sieve to remove the bones, ginger, garlic and spring onions. Return the clear liquid to the pan and add the meat you took off the bones earlier and the can of creamed corn to the stock. Add a splash of cold water to the cornflour in a mug, mix well and stir into the stock. Bring back to a simmer. In a large jug, whisk the sesame oil, a tablespoon of soya sauce and the eggs together. Remove the soup from the heat and stir it hard, drizzling the egg mixture in a stream into the rotating liquid. Taste to check the seasoning, adding salt and pepper if necessary. Serve immediately, dressed with some chopped spring onion.

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.

Sticky chicken pieces in coke

One of the recipes on this blog that gets more hits than almost all the others is the ham in Coca Cola recipe I posted a couple of years ago. (Do try it if you haven't yet - it really is good.) This means that my ears pricked right up last week when talking to a couple of Chinese friends, who were discussing a Chinese student recipe involving chicken wings, a wok and some coke; a delicious but extremely easy recipe, apparently impossible to mess up through student drunkenness.

I had a play with some bits of chicken (thighs rather than wings here, because that was what was in the fridge), soya sauce, ginger, garlic and coke when I got home, and I'm really pleased with the results. If you enjoy Malaysian cooking, with its propensity for sweetness in savoury dishes, you'll love this; the sweetness is balanced by the dark spices from the coke, the zing of the chilli and some lovely aromatic ginger.

Make sure you buy full-fat coke, not the diet stuff. Diet cola will not work here - the sauce won't thicken as it caramelises, and you'll not achieve any sweetness from it because the aspartame will degrade and taste revolting.

To serve two, you'll need:

4 chicken thighs (or other chicken joints with the bone in and the skin still attached)
Coca Cola to cover
4 cloves garlic
1 piece of ginger, the size of your thumb
1 red chilli
4 tablespoons light soya sauce
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
Salt and pepper
Vegetable oil

Pat the chicken dry with kitchen paper and sprinkle with a little salt and pepper. Leave to one side while you slice the garlic finely and cut the peeled ginger and the chilli into matchsticks.

Heat a little vegetable oil in a wok or a large pan over a high flame, and fry the chicken pieces until the skin is beginning to brown. Add the ginger, chilli and garlic, then stir fry for a minute. Pour over the cola so the chicken is covered, and add the soya sauce and the vinegar.

Put a lid partially over your wok or pan, making sure that you leave a gap at one side for plenty of steam to escape. Turn the heat down to a medium setting when the cola begins to simmer, and leave, turning the chicken occasionally, for about half an hour (depending on your pan), until the coke has reduced by more than two thirds and the liquid in the pan is syrupy. Serve immediately with rice, a little chilli sauce and a sharply dressed salad.

Minted chicken stir-fry

Summer's here, and my herb garden's doing really well. When we moved here a couple of years ago, we found an abandoned butler sink in the garden. While they look lovely in the kitchen, I wouldn't want one in the house; they're much less practical than a double sink with a waste disposal unit, and it's surprisingly easy to drop and break crockery in an something as deep as a butler sink. We used it as a herb trough instead - it's just the right size, comes with instant drainage (the plug hole), fits nicely into the space by the back door, and you can get a good depth of compost in there.

Mint (back left in the photo) is a herb that I only ever plant in containers, because if it gets going in the garden it spreads and spreads and spreads until you've not got a garden any more, just a minty carpet. This recipe uses the fresh leaves in an unusual non-lamb application - it's fresh, clean-tasting and an excellent hayfever season dish - the curry clears your nose out and the mint gives you something to smell. To serve four, you'll need:

450g (1 lb) chicken breasts, cut into cubes
1 egg white
1 tablespoon cornflour
2 red peppers, cut into large dice
1 handful mange tout peas
4 cloves crushed garlic
150 ml chicken stock (a stock cube is fine here)
1 tablespoon curry paste
2 teaspoons Chinese black bean sauce
2 teaspoons soft brown sugar
1 glass Chinese rice wine
2 tablespoons light soya sauce
1 small handful fresh mint leaves
Salt
Flavourless oil for stir-frying

Put the chicken pieces in a bowl with the egg white and cornflour, and leave aside for half an hour. Stir-frying chicken marinaded in this way is called velveting, and makes the meat very succulent, but if you're in a dreadful hurry or simply out of eggs, you can leave this stage out.

Stir-fry the chicken in a very hot wok until it's turned white and has cooked through. Remove the chicken to a plate, put some new oil in the wok and heat it up again. Stir-fry the peppers, peas and garlic for two minutes, then add all the other ingredients except the chicken and mint. Cook for another two minutes, then throw in the chicken, coating it with the sauce. Remove from the heat, add the mint, stir thoroughly to mix and serve immediately with rice.

Chicken parmigiana

This is, for me, one of the very nicest things you can do with a chicken breast. The chicken is beaten flat with a heavy rolling pin, coated in crumbs and parmesan cheese, and sautéed gently in butter and olive oil until golden and crisp. It's served on a bed of rich tomato sauce. I love this dish served with some buttered white rice - you can also serve it with pasta.

Parmigiana simply means 'cooked with parmesan cheese'. If, like me, you find yourself cooking with a lot of parmesan, you should consider investing in a Microplane grater. I love these things (mine was a wedding present and gets used several times a week) - they grate your parmesan very finely, and with no risk to your knuckles. The fine grade is absolutely perfect for parmesan, and it's also great for reducing garlic to a pulp, for zesting fruit and for grating nutmeg.

To serve four greedy people you'll need:

Sauce
1.5 kg fresh ripe tomatoes
3 large onions
4 cloves of garlic
1 handful fresh basil
1 handful fresh oregano
1 mild red chilli
1 ½ tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons sugar
1 large knob butter, plus extra to taste
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and pepper

Chicken
4 large chicken breasts
4 oz fresh breadcrumbs (about a cup for Americans)
4 oz freshly grated parmesan cheese (ditto)
½ teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1 large knob butter
1 tablespoon olive oil

Begin by peeling and seeding the tomatoes. (This is very easy - use a knife to make a little cross in the skin at the bottom of the tomato, then pour over boiling water and leave for ten seconds. Fish the tomato out with a slotted spoon. You'll find the skin will come away easily. Slice open to remove the seeds.) Chop the tomato flesh and set aside in a bowl.

Dice the onions and chop the garlic finely, and fry in a large knob of butter until translucent and fragrant. Add the tomatoes and finely chopped chilli to the saucepan and stir to combine everything. Bring to a very low simmer, and reduce (this will take more than an hour) to half its original volume or a little less. Bring the vinegar and sugar to the boil in a small pan and stir it into the sauce. Add the oregano and season with salt and pepper. Taste to check whether you need more salt or sugar. Add another knob of butter for a more mellow flavour if you like. Set the finished sauce aside.

Place the chicken between two sheets of cling film and beat it with the end of a rolling pin to flatten it out. Mix the paprika, salt, pepper, cheese and breadcrumbs well in a shallow dish. Dip the flattened chicken breast into the beaten egg, then dip the eggy chicken into the dish of cheesy crumbs until it is well coated. Set the sauce to reheat.

Heat the oil and butter in a non-stick frying pan until it sizzles, and drop in the breaded chicken pieces. Saute on each side for about 5 minutes, until golden and crisp. Spoon some of the sauce into the middle of a ring of rice on each plate and place a chicken breast on top of it. Dress with a bit of basil, if you're feeling artistic. Serve immediately with a green salad dressed sharply.

Beer can chicken

Your eyes aren't deceiving you - this is a chicken with a can of Guinness bunged up its how-do-you-say. With a dry rub, it's a brilliant, if slightly obscene way to cook chicken. The beer, flavoured with some of the spicy rub, steams the chicken from inside, resulting in a juicy, delicate flesh, while the skin cooks to a crackling, caramelised crispness.

My friend Lorna pointed me at this extraordinarily cheap roasting stand from Amazon when I complained that my beer can often threatens to topple when I make this dish. It's worth spending a couple of pounds on a stand like this (bend one of the wire loops to fit the can onto the little dish; it'll keep the chicken nice and sturdy along with the can). If you don't own a stand, just make sure that the chicken is resting levelly on the can. Don't be fooled into using the chicken's legs to balance the beast - they'll shrink and change shape when they cook.

To roast one rude-looking chicken to perfect succulence you'll need:

1 plump chicken without giblets
1 can of beer
2 heaped tablespoons ground cinnamon
1 heaped teaspoon mustard powder
1 teaspoon chilli powder (I like powdered chipotles for this, but you can use cayenne pepper)
1 teaspoon allspice
1 tablespoon salt
3 heaped tablespoons soft dark brown sugar

Snip through any strings holding the chicken's legs neatly together, and spread them out. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a bowl and rub them all over the chicken, then add a tablespoon of the rub to the cavity of the chicken and smear it around a bit with the back of a spoon. Leave for the flavours to penetrate for two hours at room temperature. Meanwhile, open the beer can, pour half of the beer out and drink it. (This is a fun recipe.) Use a metal skewer or a nail and hammer to make a few more holes in the top of the half-full beer can.

Put a tablespoon of the remaining rub in the can with the beer. It will froth and bubble, so add your rub carefully. After the two hours are up, rub any remaining spice mix onto the chicken and push the bird carefully, bottom (that's the end with the legs) first, onto the upright beer can, as in the picture. Roast the whole apparatus at 180° C (350° F) for 1 hour and 30 minutes, remove the bird carefully from the can without spilling any beer, and rest for ten minutes before serving. (If you are a lucky person with a large and easily controlled barbecue, try cooking the chicken in there over some flavourful wood - it'll be delicious.)

Don't be tempted to use the hot beer as a sauce. It'll taste bitter and revolting, so just pour it down the sink. Let the chicken's natural juices (there will be plenty, and they'll come out of the bird as it rests) act as a gravy. This is a great dish with a salad and a pilaf or cous cous. Serve with a couple of nicely chilled cans of whatever beer you used in the cooking.

One-dish roast chicken, potatoes and accompaniments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green curry

Thai green curry is fierce stuff. A green chicken curry is also pretty easy to make at home; with half an hour to spare you can produce a wok full of searingly hot, aromatic deliciousness.

Although you can make your own curry paste from spices and fermented fish paste at home, I've found that Mae Ploy's green curry paste is so good and so convenient I don't bother any more. Some UK supermarkets stock it (I've seen it in Waitrose and Sainsbury's), you'll find it in oriental supermarkets as a matter of course, and it's available online in the UK and through Amazon in the US, where you can buy things to eat while you read your books. Please do not believe what it says on the pot. If you use three tablespoons of this extremely hot paste in a curry of this size, you'll lose sensation in most of your digestive tract for the rest of the evening (which may be a blessing). I love hot curries, but there's a point past which even my tastebuds refuse to go.

To serve two you'll need:

1 can coconut milk
2 tablespoons Mae Ploy green curry paste
2 large chicken breasts, boned and skinned
8 small aubergines, halved, or one large one cut into pieces
1 small can bamboo shoots
1 tablespoon palm sugar (substitute soft brown sugar if you can't find any)
5 kaffir lime leaves, torn
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 handful basil leaves

I couldn't find any kaffir lime leaves - they'd sold out at the Malaysian supermarket I went to in London at the weekend, so I used the pared zest of a lime instead. If your supermarket stocks Bart's Spices, you should be able to find freeze-dried kaffir lime leaves, which work very well.

I like to use Chaokoh coconut milk (Americans can find it here, and Brits here; it's very inexpensive and extremely useful in the kitchen, so stock up on plenty). It's something Rosemary Brissenden's excellent South East Asian Food put me onto; when cooking a Thai curry, you need to look out for a coconut milk like Chaokoh, without emulsifiers, thickeners and God knows what else. This is because you'll be cooking with the thick part of the milk, which will float to the top of the can, until it separates and releases its oil - in a coconut milk with added gubbins, the oil will never separate out, no matter how much you cook it. You need this oil for flavour, and because it's the fat you'll be 'frying' the curry's ingredients in.

Chop all your ingredients before you start. Put the thick, solid part of the coconut milk in the wok (about half a can of a watery-looking liquid will remain in the can), and cook it, stirring, over a high flame until it is bubbling and the oil has separated from it. Add two tablespoons of curry paste to the wok and carry on stirring until the paste no longer smells harsh and raw - you'll notice a mellow, aromatic fragrance starts to develop.

Add the chicken to the wok and continue to 'fry' until the meat has all changed colour. As you stir, add the remaining liquid from the coconut can, a tablespoon at a time. Add the sugar, fish sauce, lime leaves or zest and vegetables to the wok and turn the heat down. Simmer for about eight minutes, until the meat and vegetables are cooked through and the sauce has thickened a little. Taste a little of the sauce to check the seasoning and adjust if you want to.

Take the wok off the heat and stir in a large handful of basil, torn roughly. Thai basil is much more fragrant, with a delicious edge of anise, but if you can't find any, the European sort will be fine. Serve on top of a bowl of rice, and make sure you allow plenty of the delicious sauce to soak into the rice.

Chicken liver parfait

...And we resume normal service.

Apologies for the last month's lack of updates, and thank-you to everyone who emailed (or recognised me from the few photos on the site, came up to me in a pub, and demanded to know what was going on). Gastronomy Domine is now officially back in the saddle, so please start checking regularly for updates again.

This chicken liver pate recipe is hopelessly good, and chicken livers themselves are hopelessly cheap. You'll find them occasionally alongside the boned, peeled, pale and sad chicken breasts in the supermarket, selling for less than a pound (cash) per pound (weight). They'll be flopping wetly in a sad, bloody plastic bag. Ignore the aesthetics here and just buy as many bags as you can, and stick them in the freezer for the day you decide you want a very easy, exceptionally good starter. Defrost before you begin, and follow the recipe as below. A frozen liver will not cook as firmly as a fresh one, but we're not after texture here, since the livers will be blitzed in the food processor and then shoved through a sieve.

Far be it from me to condone lying to guests. But if you have an awkward type who remembers the grey stuff with tubes in from school and says they do not like livers coming round for lunch, please feel free to call this something else, and make like it's just lovely . . . meat. The really duplicitous among you will get away with calling this a duck pate; I defy anyone to tell the difference. The Worcestershire sauce, nutmeg and chipotle chillis may sound like curious additions to a parfait like this, but you can trust me here; they work, and are not overpowering.

To fill a terrine dish, serving eight for a starter or four for a boozy lunch, you'll need:

1 ½ lb chicken livers
1 tablespoon salted butter for sauteeing
½ lb butter for puree
¼ lb butter for melting over the top (say a prayer to the cholesterol god at this point)
1 bulb garlic
1 medium onion
3 shallots
Freshly ground nutmeg
½ wineglass madeira
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon chipotles in adobo

Rinse the livers carefully in running water and pat dry. Chop the onions, garlic and shallots roughly (don't worry about being too even here; they're going in the food processor shortly) and saute them in the butter in a large pan over a high heat for about four minutes. When the onions, shallots and garlic start to brown, add the livers, season with salt and pepper and cook for two minutes, keeping everything on the move.

Bring the heat down and keep sauteeing for another five minutes or so, until the livers are nearly cooked through. (You'll be able to tell by prodding them with your spatula; they become less springy as they cook.) Add several gratings of nutmeg (I like quite a lot) to the livers with the Madeira, Worcestershire sauce and the chillis, and deglaze the pan. Turn the heat off when the liquid has reduced to half its original volume.

Turn everything in a bowl and leave to cool. Take half a pound of butter out of the fridge to soften at the same time.

When the livers are cool and the butter is soft, put the livers in the bowl of the food processor and puree. Add the softened butter a tablespoon at a time once the livers are pureed, and keep processing until it's all amalgamated. Your mixture will be very soft (almost like buttercream icing), but don't worry; it will firm up in the fridge.

Push the puree through a sieve into a terrine dish. The straining through a sieve is important; it'll buy you a gorgeously smooth texture which you can't get through processing alone. Flatten the top with a spatula and melt the remaining ¼ lb of butter, then pour it over the surface. If you are particularly fussy, you can clarify the butter first, but I'm afraid I don't bother.

Refrigerate the mixture for a couple of hours before serving. I'm still in two minds as to whether this works most brilliantly with Melba toasts or with a nutty, rustic bread toasted in thick slices. Experiment for yourself and let me know what you think.