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.

Shooter's sandwich

I first came across this recipe on the Two Fat Ladies' television show a decade or so ago. Their version of a shooter's sandwich was very plain - just a steak, salt, pepper and two Portobello mushrooms inside a hollow loaf of bread. My recipe for this perfect picnic food is a bit more exciting, with more steak, more mushrooms, plenty of garlic, fresh herbs, some sauteed wild mushrooms and a generous spiking of vermouth. It's delicious, and it looks so fantastic when you slice into it that your fellow picnickers will be speechless first with awe and later because it's very hard to talk through a mouthful of mushrooms and meat.

The sandwich looks complex, but it's very easy to prepare. The secret is in the long pressing it receives between two chopping boards. To make enough for four (alongside other picnic nibbles) you'll need:

1 loaf white bread
2 sirloin steaks, a bit shorter than the loaf
4 Portobello mushrooms
1 handful dried mushrooms
4 cloves garlic
1 handful fresh herbs (I used parsley, marjoram, chives and thyme)
½ wineglass vermouth (I used Noilly Prat)
Olive oil
Butter

Cover the dried mushrooms (I used a mixture of porcini, shitake and oyster mushrooms) with boiling water and set aside. Slice one end off the loaf and hollow out the middle, setting the soft crumb to one side.

Saute the steaks, seasoned with pepper but without salt, for two minutes per side in the olive oil. Remove to a plate. It is important that your steaks are rare so that they give up their moisture to the sandwich when pressed.

Reduce the heat and melt one knob of butter in the pan with the olive oil from the steaks. Saute the Portobello mushrooms with two smashed cloves of garlic until the mushrooms are soft and starting to release their juices. Transfer to the plate with the steaks.

Melt the other knob of butter in the same pan, and drain the dried mushrooms, reserving their liquid. Saute the dried mushrooms with two more smashed cloves of garlic for about five minutes, then add half the soaking liquid and the vermouth. Simmer until all this liquid is reduced to a few tablespoons of glossy syrup.

Season the steaks and mushrooms with plenty of salt and some more pepper. Build layers of steak, Portobello mushrooms, wild mushrooms and herbs inside the loaf until you have used everything up - if any cracks appear in the loaf, patch with the crumb you reserved. Pour any juices from the plate into the sandwich with the liquid from the pan. Wipe the cut end of the loaf in any remaining pan juices and put it back on the loaf. Wrap the whole thing in three layers of greaseproof paper and tie up tightly with string.

Place the loaf on a chopping board so the steaks are lying horizontally. Place another chopping board on top of the loaf and weight it down - I used two large, cast-iron pans and both sets of weights from the scales. Leave the sandwich (no need to refrigerate) for five hours.

Serve the sandwich by simply slicing through the whole stuffed loaf with a breadknife. The steaks will be juicy, the pressed mushrooms silky, and the whole thing full of concentrated flavour. If it's too late in the year for picnics, don't worry; just serve with some hot sauteed potatoes for a filling supper. Make a martini with some more of the vermouth if you feel that way inclined, and enjoy.

Chicken with fairy ring mushrooms

Waitrose usually carries at least one seasonal wild mushroom, with several on the shelves in the autumn. At the moment, it' s mousseron mushrooms, usually called the fairy ring mushroom in the UK. (Not by Waitrose, though - perhaps mousseron sounds more tasty.) The fairy ring is a tender, round-capped, yellow fungus with a subtle but delicious flavour. It's the mushroom you see growing in circles in lawns, and you can pick your own - but do be careful to check any mushrooms you pick in the wild in a good mushroom identification book. I'd recommend Peter Jordan's Mushroom Picker's Foolproof Field Guide.

Thyme, garlic and the slight tang of crème fraîche are gorgeous with these little mushrooms. They're pretty tiny and shrink down further on cooking, so to eat them as an accompaniment you'll need a few boxes of them. To make them go as far as you can, you can use the mushrooms to make a sauce. Like this, they're wonderful with chicken. I was only able to find chicken without skin, so I wrapped pancetta around it to add a little fat and to keep the moisture in. If you've got good chicken breasts with skin on, you can leave the pancetta out if you like; just brown the skin well when you saute.

To serve two, you'll need:

2 plump chicken breasts
6 slices pancetta
1 punnet fairy ring (mousseron) mushrooms
4 shallots, diced
2 cloves garlic, chopped finely
2 tablespoons crème fraîche
A few sprigs of thyme
Butter for sauteeing
Salt and pepper

Place a sprig of thyme on each chicken breast, and wrap pancetta around the breast, holding the thyme in place. You shouldn't need to secure it; as the pancetta cooks, it will stop being flexible enough to unroll. Saute gently for about eight minutes per side, until the pancetta is golden-brown.

While you saute the chicken, melt some butter in another small pan and soften the shallots and garlic. When the shallots are transluscent, add the mushrooms and a sprig of thyme. Saute, keeping everything on the move, until the mushrooms are cooked and soft.

Add the crème fraîche to the mushroom pan, stir briskly until everything is amalgamated, and season. Put a pool of the mushroom sauce on each plate and place the cooked chicken on top. I served this with mashed potatoes, and a green salad with a sharp dressing.

Crostini al funghi - mushrooms on toast for grown-ups

Mushrooms on toast is a noble and ancient English nursery tea. When I was tiny, I read Alison Uttley's Little Grey Rabbit and loved it dearly; Little Grey Rabbit would peel the pinky-beige satin skins off field mushrooms and stroke them before cooking them on her stove. In love with the bunny, I developed a fascination with mushrooms.

I'm grown up now. I can't eat mushrooms on toast without being all post-ironic about it. In this form, though, kiddies' mushrooms on toast becomes elevated to a dinner party amuse bouche; a gorgeous, silky, creamy, rich cloud of mushrooms on crisp slices of grilled ciabatta.

I still eat it for tea. What the hell; I'm posh.

To serve three for a grown-up nursery supper, you'll need:

1 large knob of butter
1 punnet small chestnut mushrooms, sliced thin
1 punnet shitake mushrooms, sliced thin
4 shallots, chopped finely
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small handful (palmful, really) dried porcini mushrooms, soaked
A glug of Marsala
1/4 pint cream
Juice of half a lemon
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 large handful chopped parsley
Salt and pepper
1 ciabatta

Melt the butter over a medium heat in a non-stick pan until it's bubbling gently, and turn the fresh mushrooms, shallots and garlic into it. Saute, stirring frequently, until they soften and give up their juices. Add the soaked porcini, and continue to saute until all the juices have evaporated.

Add the Marsala (about a shot-glass full) and simmer until it's all evaporated and the alcohol has burned off. Add the cream, cayenne pepper and mustard, and stir in the lemon juice, tasting all the time (you might want to use more or less than half a lemon). Simmer until the mixture bubbles and thickens, stir in the parsley off the heat, and season to taste.

While you cook the mushrooms, slice a ciabatta diagonally into ten, and toast the slices until crisp. Pile the mushrooms on the ciabatta slices, and serve immediately. Little Grey Rabbit was missing a trick.

Babi chin - Braised pork with soy beans

Tonight, I feel like something Malaysian. Wandering around Tesco, I realise it's my lucky day; one of my favourite cuts of meat in Chinese and Malaysian terms is pork belly, which is full of flavour (and full of fat - but where do you think that flavour comes from?), and which becomes sticky and rich when braised for a long time. (It also makes a wonderful, crackling roast, which I hope to explore in a later post.) Pork belly is not a remotely popular thing in the UK, and, absurdly, this very tasty cut is only £1.50 for 160 grams. I look around at the grim women pushing joyless trolleys full of chicken nuggets and frozen pizzas, and think unrepeatably uppity thoughts. There is nothing like a Friday evening spent simmering things that smell nice, and feeling smug.

This dish uses cinnamon, which you may think of as a dessert spice. Try it with the meat in this recipe; you'll add it at the beginning, in a paste with the onions and garlic, where it becomes beautifully aromatic. You'll also need some black bean and garlic sauce, which is available in Chinese supermarkets, and a good five-spice powder.

Proper five-spice powder contains Szechuan peppercorns (not really a pepper, but a dried berry), star anise, cloves, fennel and more cinnamon. A good source in Cambridge is Daily Bread, a wholefood warehouse where they grind their own spices. They sell spices in containers of different sizes; little plastic bags, jam jars and enormous great sacks. (It's a pretty inexpensive way to buy spices; if you're in the area, give them a try. They are Christians of a slightly maniacal bent, but hey; the spices are good.)

Babi chin is another dark and rich recipe, and good for warming you from within. You'll need the following:

1 medium onion
5 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon dark soya sauce
1 glass Shaoxing rice wine
3 tablespoons (half a jar) garlic black bean sauce (see photo)
2 teaspoons five spice powder
1 lb pork belly (with skin), sliced into bite-sized cubes
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, sliced into coins
6 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked
5 spring onions, whole
Water (to cover)
1 tablespoon groundnut oil

Chop the onion and garlic as fine as possible in a blender with the cinnamon. Heat the oil and fry the onion, garlic and cinnamon mixture until golden. Add the black bean sauce, the soya sauce, the five spice powder and sugar, and stir fry for two more minutes.

Add the pork and ginger, with a glass of rice wine and enough water to barely cover it with the sauce ingredients. Stir well to mix and increase the heat under the wok to high. Boil the sauce briskly until it is thick and reduced (about fifteen minutes). Add more water (about a pint) and bring to a simmer.

Add the soaked mushrooms and the spring onions. Lower the heat under the wok, cover it and simmer, stirring occasionally until the pork is meltingly tender (aim to be able to cut it without a knife). If you feel the sauce is too thick, add a little more water. Serve with rice.

This is beautiful, glossy, and syrupy. If I were in Malaysia, I'd have put some sugar cane in there with the pork. Sadly, I'm in Cambridgeshire. Sugar cane is not really considered a commodity over here. I need a holiday somewhere where interesting things grow.

Mushroom risotto

It's cold. It's windy. When these conditions prevail, our bodies are programmed to do something rather special. They are programmed to crave stodge.

One organism, the mushroom, does better than we do in the cold, leafy months. The supermarket shelves are overflowing with punnets upon punnets of mushrooms, and they're quite reasonably priced. On top of this, almost everybody I know seems to have a cold at the moment, and I think some garlic, said to have a mild antibiotic effect, is in order. Stodge, mushrooms and garlic. This is a perfect excuse for some mushroom risotto.

Carnaroli is my favourite risotto rice. It's a fat, short grain which will absorb more than its own weight in stock, and cooks to a fluffy, swollen, creamy risotto. If you can find carnaroli rice, do try using it instead of arborio, which is more often sold as a risotto rice in supermarkets.

For six people, I use:

500g fresh mushrooms, sliced
1 small handful dried cepes (porcini), soaked, the soaking water reserved
5 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon fresh thyme, chopped
1 large handful parsley, chopped
1/2 a teaspoon cayenne pepper
juice of 1/2 a lemon
2 pints of stock
5 shallots, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
400g carnaroli rice
1 glass marsala
2 tablespoons creme fraiche
4 heaped tablespoons grated parmesan
3 large knobs of butter
Olive oil
Seasoning

I used shitake mushrooms (meaty, robust little beasts which keep a good, toothsome texture; they don't melt to a slime) and oyster mushrooms (less good, honestly, but still pretty darn nice). I don't wash them, but wipe them instead with kitchen towel so that they don't absorb unwanted water. I fried all the mushrooms (including the cepes) with two of the cloves of garlic and half the thyme in a mixture of butter and olive oil, and when they were cooked, stirred in the parsley, squeezed over the lemon and sprinkled over a little salt and some cayenne pepper.

While the mushrooms were frying, I made the risotto base. The celery, shallots, the rest of the garlic and the rest of the thyme were sauteed in oil and butter, and when soft the rice was added, and then fried gently, without changing colour, for a couple of minutes until transluscent.

I added the marsala, and stirred until it was all absorbed. Then I added the soaking liquid from the cepes and stirred until that was all absorbed. The two pints of stock were then added a ladle at a time, each time stirring and stirring until all the liquid had gone before adding another ladle.

After about twenty minutes, the liquid was all absorbed, and the rice creamy and tender. I stirred in the mushrooms, cheese and creme fraiche. Serve this quickly, while it's still hot and moist. I have managed to convert at least one mushroom-hater with this risotto - try it yourself, and open your arms and welcome winter.