Stuffed focaccia with mozzarella, artichokes and smoked ham

Oozy, garlicky, herby, smoky and greasy. What’s not to like? Focaccia is the ideal bread to make this sort of baked sandwich from. It’s oily, so it bakes to a gorgeous crisp, and it’s a relatively flat bread, so works well sliced in two horizontally. I like to make my own focaccia (the feeling of an oil-enriched dough, stretchy, silky and puffy with yeast is obscenely – there’s no other word for it – tactile against your palms), but this should work very well with a bought one.

To serve four at an al-fresco lunch (with other nibbles) you’ll need:

1 focaccia
2 balls mozzarella di bufala
150g char-grilled artichoke hearts in olive oil
½ jar sun-dried red peppers in olive oil
12 slices raw smoked ham (I like Waitrose’s prosciutto affumato)
1 fat clove garlic
1 handful flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1 handful oregano, chopped
1 handful tarragon, chopped
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
100ml extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper

Slice the mozzarella and the artichoke hearts into pieces about ½ cm thick, and put in a mixing bowl. Add the sun-dried peppers, the ham, the garlic, crushed, the herbs, the zest and juice of the lemon and the olive oil with a good grating of pepper (no salt), and mix well so everything is coated with the oil and lemon juice. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least an hour (or up to overnight).

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F). Use a bread knife to cut the focaccia in half carefully along its equator, creating a top and a bottom for your sandwich. Layer the ingredients on the bottom half of the bread, starting with the mozzarella, then making a layer of the artichokes, peppers and ham, which you can tear into pieces before adding to the sandwich, if you like. Pour the marinade over the ingredients in the sandwich, sprinkle with salt to taste, and put the lid on, pressing down firmly.

Put the stuffed focaccia on a baking tray and bake for 25-30 minutes until the focaccia is golden and crusty on top, and the melting mozarella is oozing out of the sides of the sandwich. Slice and eat immediately.

Cheese fondue

I was born in the 1970s, which makes Dr W’s gift of a fondue set a pleasingly retro and apposite birthday present. Everybody’s parents had a set back in the day which they used for entertaining, and I remember hiding on the landing listening to raucous parties, then sneaking downstairs once they’d all finished and my parents had gone to bed. I would then while away the small hours eating any remaining cheesy bits and polishing off any leftover wine.

This, dear reader, is how I became a dipso at the tender age of three.

Fondues are fantastic interactive food. I’ve always held that the foods that require you to *do* something with what’s on your plate, whether it’s wrapping stuff in lettuce leaves, dribbling sauce down your arms or making minty little parcels, taste all the better for the work involved. Convivial and delicious – who could ask for more? You can do all the preparation of the fondue on top of the stove, and move it to the table and its little stand with the flame when you’re ready to eat.

I’ve used a mixture of cheeses here – Emmenthal, Gruyere and Comte. Using these cheeses results in a sweetly nutty fondue, and for me the balance of flavours between the three is pretty much perfect.

Cider’s not traditional here (fondue isn’t from Normandy), but it’s great with the cheese mixture, and hell – once you’ve spent all that money on cheese, I don’t want you impoverishing yourself by using good wine on this dish when you could be impoverishing yourself by drinking it instead. Be sure to mix the cornflour into the cold cider before you start to cook – this will make your fondue smooth and will prevent lumpy or greasy bits, making the cheese and other ingredients coexist in happy, glossy suspension.

I have read warnings that you should not drink too much cold liquid during or after consumption of a cheese fondue for fear of solidifying a bolus of melted cheese in your stomach and finding your digestive system horribly overwhelmed (and presumably dying, eventually, of cheese). If you have read similar warnings I can assure you that you can ignore them. I drank like a fish when we christened the fondue set in the picture at the top, and suffered neither indigestion nor death.

To serve three, you’ll need:

Fondue
200 g Emmenthal
200 g Gruyere
200 g Comte
2 shallots
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon cornflour
300 ml medium dry cider
1 tablespoon grainy Dijon mustard
1 shot-glass Armagnac (this is mere posing – I’ve used it because it’s great with the cider and apples, but it’s not absolutely necessary. You can leave it out if you can’t find any)

To serve
1 large baguette
3 large carrots
3 apples (choose something tart like a Granny Smith)
9 new potatoes (Fingerlings, Pink Fir Apple and other nobbly potatoes are great here)

Chop the raw carrots and apples into bite-sized pieces and set aside. Steam the new potatoes whole for 20 minutes and set aside to cool.

Grate the cheeses and mix together in a large bowl. Dice the shallot very, very finely, and stir the cornflour into the cider in a large jug. (Be careful here – when you stir it in, it will foam, so make sure your jug is large enough to stop any bubbles from escaping.)

Put your fondue pot on the oven hob over a low heat, and sauté the finely diced shallots gently in the butter until they are sweet and translucent (about 10 minutes), stirring all the time so they do not colour. Stir the cider and cornflour mixture well, and pour it over the shallots. Bring everything to a gentle simmer.

Still over a low flame, add the grated cheese to the liquid in the fondue pot a handful at a time, stirring after you add each handful until the cheese is melted and incorporated into the cider mixture. Stir in the mustard and Armagnac with salt and pepper to taste (you may not need any salt – taste the mixture before seasoning). Move the fondue pot to the table, light the little flame, and dig in, dipping hunks of baguette, bits of carrot and apple, and whole, tiny potatoes into the gorgeously savoury cheese sauce.

Asterix in Switzerland(seriously) suggests vaguely sexual forfeits for anyone losing a piece of bread in the fondue pot. I have a better idea – if someone loses the bread, tell them it’s their turn to do the washing-up.

Quince cheese

Quinces If, like me, you are now drowning in quince jelly (this is not a bad thing, per se, given that it makes a great gift and will keep in its jar for years), you may be looking for something else to do with your excess quinces. I know my parents have a whole stable filled with them, lined up neatly in cardboard crates. Like apples, the fruits will keep well in a cool, dry and dark place – check on them regularly as you would with apples though, because once one goes bad the rest will soon follow unless you remove it and throw it away immediately.

Membrillo, or quince cheese, is something you may have spotted on fashionable cheeseboards. It’s not a cheese at all, but a lovely heavy, sweet gel made from the flesh of the quince boiled down with sugar. It’s a wonderful contrast to salty cheeses like manchego – one of my favourite midnight snacks is simply a hunk sawn off the end of the piece of parmesan that’s always in the fridge, nibbled with a spoonful of quince cheese. When your quince cheese is ready, it will keep almost indefinitely in the fridge. I preserve mine in jars and spoon out chunks – some people prefer to make it in moulds, chill the moulds and turn the finished membrillo out when cold, then keep the pretty blocks wrapped in greaseproof paper and tin foil.

You’ll need:

3 lb quinces
1 lemon
Granulated sugar (see below for measurements)
Water

Peel and core the quinces and cut them into chunks. Quinces are an abominably tough fruit to work with, so make sure your knife is extremely sharp and be sure to protect your fingers from slips. Put the quince pieces in a large saucepan and cover with water, cover with the lid, then simmer very gently for around three hours until the fruit is soft when poked with a fork. It will have turned a lovely lipstick pink.

Drain the pieces and weigh them, and measure out an equal weight of sugar. Put the quince pieces in the food processor and blitz until you have a paste, then combine the paste with the sugar and the juice and zest of the lemon in a saucepan with a thick bottom (an enamelled cast-iron pan like one from Le Creuset is really useful here). Simmer the mixture over a very, very low flame, stirring until the sugar has all dissolved in the quince paste. Continue to simmer gently without a lid, stirring every now and then to make sure the bottom does not catch, for about two hours, until the paste is a deep red-brown and your spoon will stand up in it.

Spoon the quince cheese into sterilised jars and cover the top with a waxed disc before you put the lid on. The jars will keep in the cupboard pretty much indefinitely, but will need to be refrigerated once opened.

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.

Feminist cheese

I have an absolutely excellent brother, who sent me a big box of cheese from The Fine Cheese Company in Bath for my birthday. (He’s got the hang of this birthday lark; he sent my Mum a big box of oysters for hers. Go Ben.)

The Fine Cheese Company are great – their cheese is beautifully kept, and the cheeses in the box arrived at a perfect stage of ripeness: the stinky cheeses were stinky, the soft ones meltingly gooey.

This particular selection, called the Sisters in Cheese Box, is all produced by female cheesemakers. My initial reaction on learning this was ‘Out of what?’, but it turns out that the milk in question is actually squirted benignly out of sheep and cows. I think I just have a filthy mind.

You can see the cheeses above. The top cheese, soft and unctuous, was my favourite. It’s a half baby Wigmore, made by Anne Wigmore in Berkshire from ewes’ milk, and it’s a wonderfully sticky little beast. Moving clockwise, the hard cheese with the yellow label is a Curworthy, made to a centuries-old recipe. The next cheese is a delicious unpasturised Brie made by Debbie Mumford in Sharpham, Devon, and was by far the best (and best-kept) English Brie I’ve tasted. Finally, the wedge of cheese is the fruity Keltic Gold, a rind-washed hard cow’s cheese from Cornwall.

A useful card on the proper storage and keeping of cheese for those of us without a lovely cool pantry is included with the box, and this cheesy cornucopia kept us busy after dinner for several days, accompanied by lots of wine, some Bath Oliver biscuits and some digestives. Thanks Ben and Katie!

Welsh Rarebit

If you’re feeling lazy, just lay some cheese on some toast, and grill it. I won’t judge you. But if you’ve ten extra minutes to spend on your supper tonight, you might want to make this deliciously savoury rarebit, flavoured with beer and shallots.

Welsh rarebit (called Welsh rabbit in some versions) used to be served by the Edwardians as a savoury – a course to be tucked under the straining waistband just after pudding. If you cool this rarebit on a cake rack (to keep the toast crisp), remove the crusts and slice the rarebit into little squares, it also makes a great canapé when speared on a toothpick with a cherry tomato.

To make three generous slices you’ll need:

3 slices seedy bread
400g sharp cheddar cheese (for extra cheesy bite, use a mixture of cheddar and parmesan)
1 shallot
5 sun-dried tomatoes in oil
1 teaspoon cornflour
1 level teaspoon mustard powder
½ teaspoon cayenne pepper (use less if you want your rarebit to be less spicy)
2 tablespoons beer (use something strongly flavoured, like a real ale)
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
A few twists of the pepper grinder

Toast the bread lightly until just golden. Grate the cheese and the shallot finely, chop the tomatoes into tiny dice, and mix with the other ingredients. (The mustard will not taste aggressively mustardy, but reinforces the cheesiness of the cheese.)

Spread the mixture evenly on the pieces of toast, making sure you cover the whole slice right to the edges. Be careful to make the covering a little thicker in the centre of the slice to avoid run-off. The cornflour will stop the beer from making the cheesy paste too wet. Place the slices of bread under the grill for five minutes or until golden. Garnish with more of the sun-dried tomatoes, and serve immediately with a glass of the beer.

Persian-spiced Halloumi

There’s a shelf in our fridge full of emergency foods. There’s emergency bacon (for those evenings where nothing but a bacon sandwich or some magic beans will do), emergency anchovies, emergency chorizo and other good things with a good long shelf-life. They’ll all make a quick and tasty supper dish. Among the preserved meats and fish, there’s always at least one emergency packet of halloumi, a lovely, salty, Greek ewe’s cheese, which does not melt when grilled.

Grilled or pan-fried Halloumi has a soft texture with a crisp surface, pleasantly resilient to the tooth. It makes a quick and delicious supper dish with a few extra ingredients – the pine nuts and sultanas work well with the salty cheese, and the capers add a lovely aromatic zing. (Rinse your capers well to make sure the dish isn’t too salty.) I served this with some cous-cous which I’d spiked with harissa and a lemony green salad.

To serve two, you’ll need:

1 pack of Halloumi
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon nonpareil capers in salt, soaked in cold water for ten minutes and well-rinsed
1 tablespoon fat sultanas
1 tablespoon toasted pine nuts
3 chopped shallots
Juice of ½ a lemon

Melt the butter in a large, non-stick frying pan, and saute the shallots with the cumin until they begin to take on a golden colour. Add the halloumi, cut into 1cm-thick slices, and lay in the pan surrounded by the shallots. After five minutes, turn the halloumi and sprinkle over the capers, sultanas and pine nuts.

After another five minutes, turn the halloumi again and pour over the lemon juice. Stir to make sure everything is combined and serve immediately.

Parmigiana di Melanzane

This is probably Dr Weasel’s favourite supper dish. Parmigiana di melanzane is a layered, baked dish of aubergines (eggplants for all the Americans out there), rich tomato sauce, parmesan and mozzarella. It’s a wonderfully savoury meal to brighten up an autumn evening.

This tomato sauce, simmered for ages until thick and unctuous, is unbelievably good – it’s also very simple, containing very few ingredients. It freezes well, so if you can face seeding and peeling even more tomatoes, make some extra and save it for the sort of snowy day when you need to eat something red. Try it with pasta, or over meatballs.

To serve four with some left over for lunch you’ll need:

2kg ripe tomatoes
4 medium aubergines
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
250 g mozzarella
Salt and pepper
Grated parmesan
Olive oil to fry

Begin by peeling and seeding the tomatoes. (Cut a shallow cross at the bottom of the tomatoes and pour over boiling water. Fish the tomatoes straight out of the water, which will have loosened their skin, and peel it off. Cut open and discard the seeds.) Cut into small dice.

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.

While the sauce is reducing, prepare the aubergine. Slice it into rounds about 1 cm thick (salt to remove the juices if you like; with modern aubergines the bitter juices have been bred out, and you’ll probably find you don’t need to salt at all) and fry each round in very hot olive oil (the aubergine slices are like little sponges, so you’ll need plenty), until brown on each side. Drain on kitchen paper and season with salt and pepper.

Set out a layer of aubergine slices in the bottom of a baking dish. Place some basil leaves on top. Pour over a layer of sauce, layer over some mozzarella, then more aubergine, more basil, more sauce and so on. When you’ve used everything up, sprinkle over the parmesan and bake for 45 minutes at 180° C, until brown on top. Scatter over some fresh basil.

Serve with crusty bread to mop up the rich juices.

Puff-pastry tomato tart

Alert readers will have gathered that I am currently drowning in tomatoes, and that yesterday’s promised recipe for the other half of a packet of puff pastry was bound to include them. You’re right – today it’s tomato tart. If, as a friend I was talking to tonight does, you have a vegetarian to entertain, you’ll find this little tart really pretty, delicious and very quick and easy to prepare.

I found this goat’s cheese (Picolive) something of a blessing; my original plan had been to stir a teaspoon of tapenade into the cheese, but this came with olive paste already sandwiched in the cheese. I bought two; it’s a very nice little cheese, and I’d like some for lunch on some crusty bread.

To serve one (again, multiply the amounts to serve more people, or serve alongside yesterday’s Pissaladiere), you’ll need:

½ sheet of puff pastry from the supermarket refrigerator cabinet
1 crottin of goat’s cheese
1 teaspoon tapenade
2 cloves garlic
10 small tomatoes (or to cover)
2 sprigs rosemary
Olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Score a centimetre from each edge of the pastry rectangle to form a crusty border which will puff up when you cook it. Use a fork to prick holes in the inner rectangle so it doesn’t rise.

Mix the tapenade and two grated cloves of garlic with the goat’s cheese, and spread it on the inner rectangle of pastry. Slice the tomatoes and arrange them in overlapping layers on top of the cheese. Top with the rosemary, season and bake at 200° C for 20-25 minutes, until brown and puffy. The tomatoes will be sweet and juicy, the cheese toothsome and the pastry crisp. It’s almost enough to make you swear off meat.

French onion soup

A friend of mine is visiting New York for work at the moment. I received an anguished message from him about a French onion soup he experienced at the Crowne Plaza off Times Square. I quote him in full, because it made me laugh.

‘The soup itself is quite nice, but is plugged by a solid lump of melted cheese that is about the diameter of a Camembert, and an inch think. We’re talking essentially an entire Camembert’s worth of American plastic cheese. I don’t mind a delicate top to the bowl, but you could have taken this out, chilled it, and made plastic cheese sandwiches for a hungry family of six.’

Poor him. (I am keeping him anonymous so he doesn’t get any death threats from Americans fond of plastic cheese.) French onion soup isn’t really that hard to get right, but not many restaurants seem to bother trying; the very worst I’ve ever had was, shamefully, in Les Halles, the old market district in Paris. Les Halles is meant to be the birthplace of French onion soup, and Le Pied au Cochon is meant to be a restaurant which specialises in the stuff. Ha. It’s rubbish. The stock’s insipid, the rubbery onions haven’t been left to caramelise, and there’s no booze in sight. The cheesey bread lid is mostly bread, and the whole leaves you with the sort of hurt feeling you get when someone you trusted has stolen your teddy bear and sold it to buy drugs. Avoid.

The cheese you use here is important, but you do have a choice open to you. You can do it the Les Halles way and use Camembert on your giant crouton, which is delicious and, when stirred into the soup, makes it creamy and cheesey and gloopy and glorious.

I consider we’ve been overdoing the soft washed-rind French cheese thing recently (I have discovered a local source of Epoisse, and that Tartiflette the other week had enough Camembert in it to keep your arteries busy for a good six months). So I went the other way with our croutons, and topped them with sweet, stringy Gruyere (actually Swiss, but who’s checking?). Gruyere has a special affinity for the sweetly Madeira-caramelised onions in this soup; try it instead of Camembert some time and see what you think.

To serve six as a starter or four as a main course, you’ll need:

3lb onions, sliced
1 small wineglass Madeira
2½ pints good beef stock or good consommé
Open-textured white bread (ciabatta or a French loaf) – 2 slices per person
1 slice Gruyere per piece of bread
3oz butter
Salt and pepper

Put the onions in a large, heavy saucepan with the butter, and simmer, stirring every twenty minutes or so, for longer than you think you should. You’re aiming to cook these to a golden, caramel unctuousness. I didn’t use a kitchen timer; I put the DVD of Ziegfeld Girl on and sang along with Judy, running to the kitchen occasionally to stir, until Lana Turner did her tragic thing with the stairs and the chaise longue at the end. (Those who are not Judy Garland fans can just set their timers for 132 minutes, but you’re missing a treat.) The onions will have cooked down to a fraction of their original volume.

When your onions are done and you have spent a quiet five minutes being surprised at how Hedy Lamarr was able to look fantastic walking down stairs with fruit on her head and invent spread-spectrum communications without turning a hair, throw the Marsala into the hot pan with the onions and let it simmer away to nothing. Add the stock or consommé, turn the heat right down and bring slowly to a simmer again.

While the soup is coming up to temperature, prepare the croutons. Toast thick slices of bread (I used a grill pan to get good dark, charred lines on each slice), lay the cheese on them and put them under the grill until the cheese starts to brown.

Serve the soup with a crouton floating on top. The soup should soak into the crisp crouton, its heat softening the cheese. Slurp the lot quickly while it’s still deliciously hot.