Crispy Thai lime chicken with fresh chilli sauce

I am currently all a-tizz about kaffir lime leaves. They're hard to find out here in the sodden fen; not all oriental grocers stock the fresh leaves (which are very pretty and look like a pair of leaves growing on the same central rib). When I have spotted them in shops, they have often been a bit elderly, and not as aromatic as you'll want them to be for cooking. Happily, you'll find them shredded and frozen in some supermarket freezer cabinets; there are currently a couple of packs in my freezer at home. They have a wonderful citrus fragrance, almost as if you were sniffing fresh lime zest through an olfactory magnifying glass. (The zest of a kaffir lime is astonishingly good stuff, but sadly I've only seen the fruit for sale in Malaysia, which isn't much help for UK home cooks.)

In most cooking, we use kaffir lime leaves in a similar way to bay leaves - as an aromatic to be infused in a wet mixture like a curry, then discarded before eating. The shredded leaves gave me an idea, though - how about using them to make a crispy crust with panko breadcrumbs for a neutral-tasting meat like chicken? Paired up with a fresh Thai chilli and ginger sauce, this turns out to be exactly how summer eating should be.

I've butterflied the chicken breasts and beaten them flat with a rolling pin to give them a bigger crispy surface area; this also helps them to cook really fast, preserving all the lovely lime flavour. I would like to believe that one per person is a sensible helping, but these were so good we ended up eating two each. To make four breaded, butterflied chicken breasts, you'll need:

Chicken
4 skinless, boneless chicken breasts
4 heaped tablespoons flour
1 egg
8 heaped tablespoons panko breadcrumbs (if you can't find Japanese panko crumbs, just use slices of white bread and whizz them to shrapnel in the food processor. Panko has a brilliant crispiness, though, and is worth seeking out.)
4 tablespoons shredded kaffir lime leaves (frozen or fresh - don't get the dried ones, which will leave you feeling as if you are cooking with cardboard)
Peanut oil or a flavourless oil for frying

Fresh Thai chilli sauce
1 piece of ginger the length of your thumb
Juice of 2 limes
4 fat, juicy cloves garlic
½ stalk of peeled lemongrass
2 birds eye chillies (reduce amount if you don't like your sauce too hot)
4 tablespoons Thai fish sauce
4 tablespoons palm sugar (most supermarkets seem to be stocking this now) or soft light brown sugar
1 small handful mint

It's easiest to make the sauce before you start on the chicken, which will need your attention for the very short time you'll be cooking it. Just put all the sauce ingredients except the mint in a mortar and pestle or (easier) a food processor or liquidiser, and process until you've a slightly chunky, wet sauce. Unlike commercial sauces, it won't be red - but it's none the worse for that. Chop the mint and sprinkle it over the sauce.

Start work on the chicken by butterflying your chicken breasts. This is far easier than you may have been expecting - just lay them flat, push a small, sharp knife into the thicker side of the chicken breast and make a horizontal cut almost all the way through to the other side. You should be able to open your chicken breast out like a book, with the fatter edge of the breast acting as the book's spine. Place the butterflied chicken breast between two pieces of cling film on a chopping board (the cling film stops them from sticking) and wallop the hell out of them with your rolling pin, until the chicken is a thin, even escalope, about half a centimetre thick. Don't worry about raggedy edges - the breading you're about to apply is amazingly forgiving.

Put the flour, seasoned with some salt and pepper, in one bowl, the beaten egg in a second and the crumbs, mixed well with the lime leaves, in a third. Dip the chicken in the flour, then the egg, then the crumbs, making sure it's coated well at every stage. Fry over a high heat for 2-3 minutes per side, until the crumbs are golden and crisp, and serve with the sauce, a salad or some stir-fried veg, and your choice of rice or noodles.

Cranberry sauce and bread sauce

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

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

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

To make the cranberry sauce you'll need:

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

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

To make the bread sauce, you'll need:

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

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

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

Spaghetti bolognese

Four hundred-plus posts on this blog, and there are still some really basic, popular things I've not written about. Would you believe that I haven't cooked a spag bol since 2005? I spent yesterday evening remedying the problem - here's a recipe for a rich, savoury, gorgeously gloppy version, full of wine and herbs.

As any self-respecting Italian will tell you, if you ordered what we call spaghetti bolognese in Italy, you would get a funny look. In Italy, this sauce is called ragù or ragù alla bolognese, and it's not usually served with spaghetti - you're more likely to find your ragù as a layer in a lasagne or served with tagliatelle.

Back in 1992, the folks in Bologna decided that they had had enough of the world's bastardisation of their hometown sauce, and the Bolognese chapter of the Accademia Italiana della Cucina issued a proclamation. From that point on, bolognese sauce would be defined strictly, and could only be called ragù alla bolognese if it was made with a limited set of ingredients: beef, pancetta, onions, carrots, celery, passata, beef stock, red wine and milk.

Inevitably, I've strayed away from the strict letter of the Accademia's law here in (cough) a few details, but I don't think you'll be too saddened by this, because what results is damn tasty. Please use the anchovies even if you don't usually like them - they add a subtle depth to the sauce, but they don't make it taste fishy.

To make enough spaghetti bolognese to serve four, you'll need:

500g ground or minced steak (ground steak is more authentic here, but if you can't find it, mince is fine)
4 banana shallots
5 anchovies
2 bay leaves
2 carrots
2 sticks celery
500g passata (pressed tomatoes)
1 tablespoon dried oregano
4 cloves garlic
5 sundried tomatoes in oil
¼ bottle red wine
1 ladle beef stock
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 large handful fresh oregano
1 large handful fresh basil
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
Parmesan to garnish

Chop the shallots finely and sweat in a large, heavy-bottomed pan with a lid over a low heat in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil for about 20 minutes, until translucent but not colouring. Add the anchovies and bay leaves to the pan and continue to cook, stirring, until the anchovies disintegrate into the shallots. Turn the heat up to medium-high and add the beef to the pan, cooking, stirring occasionally, until the meat is browning all over. Add the finely diced carrot and celery with a tablespoon of dried oregano and the chopped garlic and chopped sundried tomatoes. Sweating off these vegetables will add some moisture to the pan - keep cooking and stirring until the pan is nearly dry again.

Pour the wine into the beef mixtures, bring up to a simmer and add the passata and beef stock with the Worcestershire sauce and balsamic vinegar. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer gently with the lid off until the sauce has reduced to a thick texture (20-30 minutes), and continue to simmer with the lid on for as long as possible, checking occasionally and adding a little water if things seem to be drying out. Mine was on the hob for four hours - if you have time to leave yours even longer, feel free - the longer the better.

Immediately before serving, stir through the chopped fresh herbs. Cook 100g spaghetti per person according to the packet instructions, and serve with the sauce and parmesan cheese.

Lamb loin fillet with caper butter sauce

I'm having some trouble writing coherently today because I have one eye (OK - two eyes) on the news - I'm obsessing somewhat about the US election, and I really, really hope the polls are accurate. The BBC is currently showing helicopter footage of a queue of voters in Virginia - it's so long that a helicopter is the only way they can film it.

Here's a really fantastic lamb dish to serve to someone you're trying to impress. Loin fillets are seared in olive oil and roasted briefly, so they're still lovely and pink in the centre, then served with a butter sauce made dense and salty with shallots, anchovies and capers. The anchovies give amazing savoury depth and richness to the dish and go fabulously with lamb, but when cooked like this they don't taste fishy - in fact, they melt into the sauce so completely that you will be able to serve this to anchovy-haters with no problems.

To serve two, you'll need:

2 lamb loin fillets
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
2 shallots
4 anchovies
2 teaspoons capers (use tiny ones in wine vinegar)
1 tablespoon cream
100g salted butter
1 clove garlic
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
Fresh basil to garnish

Crush the garlic and rub it all over the lamb with the lemon zest, a little salt and plenty of pepper. Put aside for an hour at room temperature. Preheat the oven to 200° C.

Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan until it starts to shimmer, and sear the lamb all over in it. The pan must be very hot - you're aiming to brown the lamb to a lovely mahogany colour. Place the whole, seared fillets in a roasting dish and put in the oven for ten minutes.
When the lamb has had ten minutes in the oven, take it out and rest it in its cooking dish in a warm place for another ten minutes while you make the sauce.

While the lamb is resting, make the sauce. Melt the butter in the frying pan (over a lower heat now) and add the finely chopped shallots. Simmer the shallots in the butter for five minutes, then add the anchovies and cook, stirring, until they have melted into the sauce. Still over a low heat, stir in the cream and capers, then use a balloon whisk to beat the lemon juice into the sauce. Start with half the juice and taste as you add more until you have a sauce which is tart and buttery all at once.

Slice the fillets into medallions and arrange on the plate with a drizzle of the sauce and some basil to garnish.

Crisp vegetable stir-fry in oyster sauce

This makes a great accompaniment to Chinese dishes, but it's delicious enough to eat as a meal on its own with rice, and it works out very inexpensive - just right for the end of the month. No good for vegetarians, I'm afraid, because I do recommend that you use oyster sauce that contains real oyster essence - it's worlds apart from the oyster-free sort. Several manufacturers make the good stuff. It'll come with the word 'premium' somewhere on the label on the front, and should list around 9% oyster extract on the ingredients label on the back. I really like Lee Kum Kee's premium oyster sauce, partly because it has such a fantastic label - a 1950s pastel-coloured confection surrounded with roses, featuring a pretty lady and little, sailor-suited boy in a boat, ferrying some absolutely giant oysters across a river. (This picture isn't huge, but if you squint, you can make it all out.)

Despite the presence of shellfish, oyster sauce doesn't taste at all fishy. It's very savoury, and has a lovely sweet edge, but there's no hint of fishiness, so you can serve this to fish-hating children (and adults) without needing to worry.

Chopping your veg into slim batons shouldn't take too long, and I actually rather enjoy the repetitive slicing - it's somehow rather soothing at the end of a long day. Try to buy reasonably small courgettes - these will be sweeter, and their flesh will be denser and easier to chop.

To serve two as an accompaniment (double the quantities if you want to eat it as a main course), you'll need:

4 large carrots
3 courgettes
4 plump cloves of garlic
6 spring onions (scallions)
1 piece of ginger, about the size of your thumb
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
5 tablespoons Chinese cooking wine
1 teaspoon cornflour dissolved in 5 tablespoons cold water
Flavourless oil to stir-fry

Cut the carrots and courgettes into slim batons, about five centimetres long and a couple of millimetres in cross-section, and set aside in a bowl. Slice the garlic thinly, chop the ginger into slim batons around the same size as the bits of vegetable, and chop the white bottom parts of the spring onions into little coins. (You won't be using the green parts, but it's worth popping them in the fridge so you can use them later on.)

Heat a couple of tablespoons of oil in the bottom of your wok over a high flame until it begins to shimmer. Throw in the garlic, ginger and spring onions, and stir-fry for about thirty seconds. Tip in the carrot and courgettes, and continue to stir-fry for a 1-2 minutes, keeping everything on the move until the courgette pieces start to go bendy (bendiness is starting to occur in the picture).

Pour the oyster sauce and wine into the wok and continue to stir-fry for two minutes. Add the cornflour mixture and keep stirring until the mixture thickens a little. Serve immediately with rice.

Paper-baked trout with beurre blanc

Talking food on the phone with my Mum last week, the subject got on to sauces. It turns out that we share a favourite - beurre blanc, a deliciously fatsome emulsion of melted butter suspended in reduced wine infused with herbs and shallot. After putting the phone down, I headed straight for the fridge.

Being fatsome, beurre blanc works best as a sauce for very lean dishes. I steamed trout en papilotte - inside a little bag made from greaseproof paper - in the oven, with more herbs and wine, then spooned the beurre blanc all over it. (I also spooned beurre blanc all over some home-fried potatoes, which are not pictured because only people who do not fear imminent death via clogged arteries should eat beurre blanc spooned all over home-fried potatoes.) It was ludicrously good.

To serve four, you'll need:

Trout
Eight trout fillets
4 bay leaves
4 sprigs tarragon
4 sprigs parsley
4 thin slices of lemon (with skin)
2 shallots
White wine
Salt and pepper

Beurre blanc
225g unsalted butter
1 shallot
1 bay leaf
3 peppercorns
5 tablespoons white wine
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon double cream
Salt and pepper

Make sure the butter is chilled, and preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Cut out four large squares of greaseproof paper and four squares of tinfoil. Lay the pieces of greaseproof on top of the tinfoil squares, and lay a bayleaf, half a sliced shallot, a slice of lemon and a sprig of parsley and tarragon in the middle of each. Place two fillets of trout on top of each pile of herbs and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of wine over the fish and fold the paper and tinfoil over to create a little packet, sealing it tight with the foil. There should be a bit of room for the steam to circulate in each packet, so don't wrap the fish up too tight. Put all four little packets on a baking sheet and put in the oven for 20 minutes.

As soon as the fish goes in the oven, start making the sauce. Put the wine and vinegar in a heavy-bottomed saucepan with the sliced shallot, the bay leaf and the peppercorns. Bring to a simmer and reduce until there is only 2 tablespoons of liquid left. Sieve the liquid to remove the shallot, bay and peppercorns, and return to the pan off the heat. Get the butter out of the fridge and cut it into cubes about the size of the top joint of your thumb.

Lower the heat, and put the pan back over the low flame. Add a teaspoon of cream to the wine reduction and use a whisk to incorporate it into the liquid. (A note here - adding cream is, strictly speaking, cheating. The cream stabilises the emulsion and will stop your sauce from breaking and splitting. Proper chefs will scoff and tell you that the addition of cream means your sauce is no longer a beurre blanc. Scoff right back at them, but make sure you take your time over it so that by the time they return to their own, cream-free beurre blanc pans, their own sauce will have split.) Whisking vigorously, add the butter to the pan, three cubes at a time. When they are half-melted, add another three, still whisking hard. Repeat until all the butter is incorporated and remove from the heat. Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper.

The fish should be ready at around the same time you finish the sauce; if the timer goes before you've finished the sauce, don't worry about it. The fish won't mind an extra five minutes in the oven.

Some people like to open the little parcels of fish at the table - the burst of fragrant steam from the punctured parcel is a fantastic opening to the meal. Spoon over the beurre blanc and some fresh parsley, and serve plenty of new potatoes or mash to help you soak up all the delicious sauce.

Italian tuna dip

This is a lovely starter for lazy days when you're eating outdoors. I like to dibble crudités (especially sweet batons of carrot) and good bread in this tuna dip. It's also very good spread on toast or crostini, and, cold or warmed through, makes a good strong sauce to dollop on bland cooked fish.

Apologies for the horrendous photo - by the time I realised how rubbish this looked, the bowl had been licked clean, so there was nothing to photograph.

To serve two as a starter with crudités and bread, you'll need:

1 small can tuna (in oil, brine or spring water), drained
2 anchovies
2 teaspoons Marsala
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
1 heaped teaspoon grainy Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon fennel seed
1 tablespoon finely chopped oregano
½ teaspoon finely chopped rosemary
1 teaspoon finely chopped sage
1 teaspoon thyme
1 tablespoon finely chopped basil
1 tablespoon finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon finely chopped mint
1 small clove of garlic, crushed
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon honey

Bash the fennel seed lightly in a pestle and mortar, and chop the herbs. Chop the anchovies very finely. Put all the ingredients in a mixing bowl and mix well until the dip ingredients all come together to form a rough paste. Add a little more olive oil if you prefer a looser texture, and taste for seasoning. Serve chilled as a dip or crostini topping, or warm through in a small saucepan to use as a sauce.

Asparagus with hollandaise sauce

Isn't eating at this time of year brilliant? The rhubarb is still sprouting away, and now the asparagus is shooting up as well. If you live in Cambridgeshire, it's well worth making a trip to Burwash Manor Barns in Barton, just outside Cambridge, where they grow tonnes of the stuff. It's picked fresh daily and sold on-site at the Larder (a very nice deli), where you'll find a lady outside trimming the stems of an enormous heap of asparagus fresh from the fields, and packing it in wrappers for sale. If you cook it as soon as you get home so the sugars don't have a chance to turn into starch, you'll find it amazingly sweet. Supermarket (and, sadly, market) asparagus is never available this fresh.

English asparagus is a real delicacy. Unlike asparagus grown in hotter climates, it pops up out of the ground relatively slowly, allowing the plant to build up a much greater concentration of sugars. Burwash asparagus is available as Class I and Class II (50p cheaper than the Class I this year) - I'd recommend the Class II packs, which taste exactly the same as the Class I asparagus, but contain spears which are a bit bendier than the ruler-straight Class I. (See picture for extent of bendiness.) The thickness of spear you choose is entirely a matter of personal taste, but do make sure that all the asparagus that you steam is the same thickness, or else it won't cook evenly.

Of course, dressing your asparagus with melted butter or just dipping each spear into the yolk of a soft-boiled egg makes for a perfectly delicious starter. That said, dressing them with a hollandaise sauce - essentially just butter and yolks with an acidic spike of reduced vinegar - somehow works out to be about ten times as delicious as either butter or yolk on their own.

Hollandaise sauce is a rich emulsification of butter and good vinegar (or lemon juice in some recipes), held together by egg yolks. I always add a little boiling water to loosen the sauce and prevent it from becoming too solid - a very thick hollandaise can be overpoweringly rich.

Making hollandaise isn't as intimidating or difficult as some make out, but it will need your full attention, so you need to make sure the answering machine gets any phone calls and ignore any cries of 'I can't find my shoes!' from the family for the ten minutes or so it takes to make.

Hollandaise is cooked at a very, very low heat. In order to stop the yolks from getting too hot and turning into an omelette, you'll be making the sauce in a bain marie or double boiler. I don't own one of the expensive dedicated double boilers - sitting a mixing bowl on the rim of a pan part-filled with simmering water works just fine and doesn't take up any extra precious cupboard space. To dress asparagus for four, you'll need:

2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons boiling water
3 tablespoons good white wine vinegar (I used Maille, which, for no very good reason, keeps turning up at my local branch of TK Maxx.)
225g (half a pat) good butter
2 peppercorns
1 bay leaf
Salt to taste

The quality of your butter is all-important here. I used Bridel from Normandy. Bridel or Beurre d'Isigny is fantastic here because of its rounded and smooth flavour.

Make sure the water for steaming the asparagus is ready and boiling on the hob as you make the sauce - you'll need a couple of spoonfuls of it for the hollandaise. Throw the asparagus into the water and put the lid on as you start to whisk the butter into the hollandaise - it only wants a little cooking, and should be bright green and ready when you finish the sauce.

Put the vinegar in a small pan with the peppercorns and bay leaf, and simmer it gently until it has reduced to about a tablespoon-full. Remove from the heat but keep warm. Melt the butter and put it in a warm jug.

Place a mixing bowl on top of a saucepan part-filled with water. The water should not touch the bowl. Bring the water to a simmer while beating the egg yolks vigorously with a hand whisk in the bowl. As the bowl warms, you will notice that the yolks start to thicken. Add a tablespoon of the boiling water to the yolks and continue beating until they begin to thicken again. Add another tablespoon and beat until the yolks are thickening once more, then add the vinegar with the bay and peppercorns removed, beating all the time until the sauce starts to thicken up again.

Pour the butter into the egg mixture in a very thin stream (as if you were making mayonnaise). Continue to whisk as you pour until all the butter is amalgamated, then remove the bowl from the heat. Taste for saltiness and acidity. If you want a little more bite to the sauce, squeeze in a few drops of lemon juice. Remove the asparagus from its water and serve with the sauce either drizzled over or as a dip.

Hollandaise sauce freezes well - when you want to use it, just bring it back to room temperature slowly.

Ezme - Turkish crushed tomato and chilli salad

It's been an exciting few days. Some readers will be aware that I have a horrible allergic reaction to lobsters (face swells, airways close, scalp comes out in lumps, I get injected with adrenaline and then sleep for two days). Unfortunately, at a Chinese meal on Sunday where the rest of the family was munching their way through a couple of lobsters while I stuck to crab, I must have accidentally ingested some, because the evening saw my eyelids slowly but surely swelling up to resemble one of those bobbly goldfish. The rest of my face soon followed, and I've been lying under a duvet, groaning, ever since.

Then, as soon as I felt well enough to tackle a post here, I realised that I've left my camera at a party the day before the lobster incident. Fortunately the party was at my parents' house, where we were celebrating my lovely Dad's 60th. The camera is safe and sound, but it is about 60 miles away, full of photos, and this does mean that two of the Turkish posts I was planning on making will have to wait until I have it back. Similarly, today's post has no accompanying photographs - please imagine a cheering, dark red paste.

Ezme is served as a starter alongside other salady nibbles to be eaten with bread in Turkey. It's extremely spicy, and also serves as a deliciously fresh cold sauce to go with grilled meats. If you're in Cambridge, check out the Turkish delicatessen on Mill Road for the hot paprika paste you'll need. (Tips from readers about where other Turkish delis can be located would be very welcome - please leave a comment.)

To serve six, you'll need:

½ lb fresh, ripe tomatoes
1 pointy green pepper (the pale sort which is good barbecued)
½ a cucumber
2 spring onions
1 small handful mint leaves
1 tablespoon hot Turkish paprika paste
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons sherry vinegar
Salt, pepper, paprika to taste

Peel the tomatoes and the cucumber, and remove the stalk, interior ribs and seeds of the pepper. Chop the tomatoes, cucumber, pepper and spring onions as finely as you can without reducing them to a pulp (careful pulsing in the food processor will also do the job). Stir in all the other ingredients, tasting for seasoning. Serve at room temperature.

Ar Jard sauce

You've tried this before - it's the crunchy, raw vegetable relish served in many Thai restaurants. I served it alongside some sweet chilli sauce with Thai pork toasts. It's very easy, and can be prepared in minutes, so if you've a little time, try shaping your vegetables. Somehow a carrot tastes about 300% nicer if it's approximately flower-shaped.

The sauce is delicious with rich dishes like the pork toasts; it's fresh, sweet and sharp, cutting through the intense savouriness of the little toasts. I didn't use any chilli in this recipe, but if you'd like your sauce to be spicy, take a red chilli, shred it finely and add it to the rest of the vegetables.

You'll need:

2 carrots
½ cucumber
1 shallot
1 cup rice vinegar (available in some supermarkets and all oriental grocers)
⅔ cup caster sugar

Put the vinegar and sugar in a pan over a low heat, and stir until all the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and set aside.

While the vinegar mixture is cooling, dice the vegetables into even-sized pieces. Exercise your artistic side if you like, and cut them into shapes. I cut mine freehand, but you can buy minuscule aspic cutters online and in kitchen shops - they're like fairy cookie cutters, and if you're like me, they're pretty irresistible. Slice the shallot into thin slices.

Pour the cooled sugar and vinegar mixture over the diced vegetables. Serve immediately.

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.

Apple sauce

At the weekend, my Dad cooked some roast pork (roast pork which he did not allow me to photograph, the shy man). Now, clearly, nothing is better with roast pork than a good apple sauce, so I spent twenty minutes the previous evening making some so that it would have a night in the fridge to infuse with quiet background flavours from some spicing and orange peel.

At this time of year the shops are full of handsome, enormous Bramley apples. They're a cooking apple too tart to eat raw (my Grandma used to grow them, and I learned this to my cost), but when cooked they melt into a beautiful, pale, fruity mush.

I peeled and chopped five apples (leaving the cores and seeds intact - there's almondy flavour in those little seeds which emphasises the apple-ness of the sauce), and put them in a pan with half a wine glass of water, three whole allspice berries, four cloves, a stick of cinnamon, two and a half tablespoons of caster sugar and some pared orange peel. Fifteen minutes of simmering reduced the chunks to a fluffy mass.

While the mixture was still warm, I beat in a large knob of butter and a pinch of salt. You only need a tiny bit of salt in this, and it doesn't make the finished sauce at all salty, just underlining the flavour of the sauce.

The mixture, still a bit rough and lumpy (and still full of spice and peel) sat on the side until cool, and then went into the fridge to develop overnight. The next morning, I pushed it through a sieve, making the texture silky and smooth, and getting rid of the spices (nothing is quite as surprising as an unexpected allspice berry cracked between your wisdom teeth). Allspice is a curiously English spice, popping up in all kinds of recipes from cake batters to treatments for game. It's the dried berry of a variety of Jamaican myrtle, and was given its name by English explorers who believed that it combined the flavour of cloves, nutmeg, pepper and cinnamon. It doesn't really; its flavour is very much its own, but in the UK a mixed, ground spice blend is sometimes used as a substitute.

The finished sauce is not a thing of beauty, but it tasted extremely good; fruity with a glossy depth from the butter and spiced in a way that didn't shout at you. Perhaps next time I'll add a little dried chili and some grated fresh ginger. We glopped it all over my Dad's excellent roast pork, and were happy.