South-East Asian salmon curry

If you made a batch of the curry paste to cook the prawns earlier this week, you'll still have half of it in a little bowl in the fridge. This is a very easy dish to cook, and many of the ingredients should already be sitting around in your storecupboard. Swap the green beans for another appropriate-feeling vegetable if you fancy, in keeping with the "what's in the fridge" nature of this one.

My salmon was bought and frozen before Christmas. It was going to be made into gravadlax before I realised that the fillet I'd bought had, for some reason, been pre-skinned. A skinned salmon fillet's a pest to cook with if you're not doing something very simple with it - too much moving around and it'll flake into bits. So a gentle poaching in a rich curry sauce is an ideal method for a fragile piece of fish like this. If your salmon has the skin on still, so much the better. Don't bother to remove it before cooking.

To serve 4, you'll need:

One large salmon fillet, about 2lb (900g), defrosted if frozen
Curry paste (see recipe)
1 large onion
2 large potatoes, chopped into 1in squares
50g green beans
1 can coconut milk
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 heaped teaspoon Madras curry powder
1 cinnamon stick
2 bay leaves
1 large handful fresh mint
1 large handful fresh coriander
Juice of 2 limes
Salt and pepper

Chop the onion into medium dice and fry it with the bay leaves, cinnamon stick and curry powder in a large pan until translucent. Add the curry paste to the pan and cook, stirring all the time, for five minutes. Pour over the coconut milk and tomatoes, and stir through the potatoes. Bring the mixture to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes without a lid, stirring occasionally.

Stir in the chopped beans and slide the salmon into the dish, making sure it is covered with the bubbling sauce. Put the lid on and continue to simmer for 12 minutes.

While the salmon is cooking, chop the mint leaves. When the time is up, stir the lime juice into the curry with salt and pepper to taste. Serve over white rice, scatter the herbs over each serving and get stuck in.

Smoked salmon hash

A quick and dirty breakfast dish. This is just perfect for Sunday mornings in bed with a tray, the papers and a very good friend. This hash is all made in one pan, salty from the salmon, studded with tart capers and stickily sweet from the sweet potatoes. A good squirt of lime juice to counter that sweetness and a spoonful of herby crème fraîche - who could ask for more?

If you do plan on making this for breakfast, it's worth chopping the potatoes and making the crème fraîche the night before so you can operate on autopilot in the morning without having to go anywhere near sharp knives.

To serve two (with some leftovers - we like leftovers round here), you'll need:

3 large sweet potatoes (make sure these are the ones with golden flesh)
3 large shallots
250g cold-smoked salmon
1 handful chives (plus a teaspoon to garnish)
1 handful parsley (plus a teaspoon to garnish)
½ handful tarragon
200g crème fraîche
2 heaped tablespoons rinsed capers
Juice of 2 limes
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 eggs
Salt and pepper

Start by making the crème fraîche. Just stir in the chopped herbs, keeping some aside to garnish the finished dish, 1 tablespoon of the capers, 1 raw chopped shallot and the juice of a lime. Set aside in the fridge and stir before serving.

To make the hash, dice the peeled potatoes and cut the remaining shallots into slices. Fry in a large pan over a medium heat in the butter and olive oil mixture, stirring regularly, until the edges of the potato pieces are caramelising and turning a golden brown.

Check that the sweet potato is cooked through (poke with a chopstick to test for softness) and tip the salmon and remaining capers into the pan. Toss with a wooden spoon until the salmon is all opaque, then sprinkle over the juice of the remaining lime. Check for seasoning. Spoon the finished hash into serving bowls, dress with the reserved herbs, add a tablespoon of the crème fraîche and top off with a fried egg.

Miso-glazed salmon

This Japanese way with fish requires you to think ahead by a couple of days. Once you've slathered it with its thick sauce, the salmon needs to cure and marinate in the fridge for at least 48 hours, by which time its flesh will be delicately infused with the flavours from the den miso. Once it's out of the fridge, it's simplicity itself to prepare under the grill.

Marinading fish in den miso is a delicious, traditional treatment. Japanese grocers in the UK often offer fish ready-smeared and packed under plastic for you to cook when you return home. A den miso marinade is also used in Nobu's utterly gorgeous black cod. I've never managed to find any black cod for sale, but salmon is just great here - try sea bass fillets too if you can get your hands on some.

To serve two, you'll need:

2 one-person-sized pieces of salmon fillet, skin still on
200g shiromiso (white miso)
2 tablespoons sake (Chinese rice wine is good here if you have no sake)
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons mirin

Most UK supermarkets seem to be stocking miso, sake and mirin (a sweet rice wine) these days, although the alcohols will be with the foreign foods section, not in the booze section. If your supermarket doesn't carry miso, have a look in your local health food shop. I've noticed that for some reason, they almost all sell a good variety of Japanese kelps, soya sauces, and miso.

Put the miso, sake, sugar and mirin in a bain marie and simmer the mixture (which is now den miso) over boiling water for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the colour darkens. Remove the den miso from the heat and set aside to cool.

Put the salmon in a small bowl and pour over the cooled marinade, making sure everything is well-coated. Cover with cling film and leave in the fridge for between two and three days, turning the fish daily.

When you are ready to cook the salmon, lay it with the skin side down on a rack over tin foil. Grill under a high flame for about four minutes, until the miso is caramelising and bubbling as in the picture. Turn the fish so the skin side is uppermost and grill for another four minutes, watching carefully to make sure the fatty skin doesn't catch and burn.

The fish will be sweet and silky with a crisp and caramelised skin. Serve with rice and a green vegetable.

Honey-mustard dill sauce for smoked salmon

Before we get onto the recipe, some family boasting is in order. Mr Weasel had his viva voce yesterday, and was let out after two hours fierce examining with no corrections to his thesis. This means that in June, he'll become Dr Weasel at a ceremony for which I get to wear a hat. Well done, sweetheart!

Onto the food.

Evelyn Rose is an English cookery writer who specialises in Jewish family recipes and entertaining on a large scale. This recipe is from her The Entertaining Cookbook, published in 1980, which I seem to find myself drawn back to on every large family occasion. She has a calm and deft ability with cooking for large groups, and all the recipes I've tried have been foolproof. I use my mother's copy, which she's had for twenty years; most of its pages are falling apart now, and the cucumber salad page is splattered with two decades of the best sugary Swedish dressing in the world. Sadly, the book seems to be out of print now, although I have spotted second-hand copies online for around £40. Fortunately, I am frequently to be found in second-hand bookshops, so it's likely I'll find a cheaper copy some time before I get too old to read.

Update: I finally found a copy of the book in late 2007, at the tender age of 31, for a mere quid on good old eBay.

This dill mustard is far better than the stuff from a jar. It's my favourite accompaniment for smoked salmon; try it with salmon, some buttered rye bread and a small salad. Evelyn Rose says it keeps in the fridge for a month - here, it's never hung around long for enough for me to test that assertion. The ingredients list may sound a little unorthodox, but I promise you it's the nicest honey-mustard dill sauce you've tried.

To make a small bowlful (enough for ten people or more) you'll need:

4 rounded tablespoons mayonnaise (I used Hellmann's)
1 level tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 level tablespoon clear honey
2 teaspoons soya sauce (I used Kikkoman)
White pepper
2 teaspoons chopped fresh dill (or more to taste)

Just mix all the ingredients together in a small bowl until everything is well-blended, and chill for a few hours before serving so the flavours mingle. I prefer freshly ground black pepper in this recipe, and usually use far more dill - two of the regular-sized supermarket packs, or about five tablespoons when chopped finely.

Smoked salmon kedgeree

Kedgeree is one of those curious dishes to come out of colonial India, with European ingredients (in this case smoked fish, usually haddock) alongside Indian spices and rice. There's an Indian dish called Khichri which is a close cousin of our kedgeree, made from rice, lentils, onions and spices.

Here in the UK it's a (now rather uncommon) breakfast dish. When I was a kid, our neighbours used to invite the whole street round for a New Year's breakfast, in which kedgeree played a starring role. Kedgeree is a good idea if you've a lot of people staying in the house; you can prepare it the day before and microwave it for a very rich and delicious brunch.

This kedgeree is a bit more delicate than the traditional smoked haddock version. It uses barely cooked smoked salmon and fresh, sweet and juicy king prawns, and instead of strong onion, I've used spring onions. The salt used in curing the salmon is sufficient for the whole dish; you will not need to add any extra.

It's important that the rice is chilled before you cook; if it is warm or hot, the grains are prone to break up and become mushy in cooking.

To serve four, you'll need:

100g basmati rice, cooked and chilled
10 spring onions, chopped
1 inch of ginger, grated coarsely
1½ tablespoons Madras curry paste (I used Patak's)
10 raw, peeled king prawns
1 pack smoked salmon, torn into shreds
1 egg per person
½ pint chicken stock
¼ pint double cream
1 handful coriander, chopped
1 knob butter

Carefully slide the eggs into boiling water and boil for six minutes; the yolk should still be soft, and the white just set. Peel, halve and set aside.

Stir fry the ginger and spring onions in a wok until soft, then add the curry paste and prawns and stir fry until the prawns have turned pink. Add the rice to the wok and stir fry. After five minutes, add the stock and salmon, and continue stir frying until the salmon has turned opaque.

Remove the wok from the heat and add the cream and coriander. Stir well, and serve with a segment of the soft, creamy egg.

This dish is inextricably associated with New Year in my head, so I served it this evening with a glass of toasty, nutty champagne. Delicious.