Posted on

Stir-fried pork belly

Pork belly stir fry
Pork belly stir fry

Chinese crispy belly pork, or siew yoke, is fabulous stuff, but it only stays crispy for a day or so. The day-two-wangy-crackling is, of course, also a problem with belly pork you’ve cooked in a western style, and this stir fry works really well with any leftover roast belly. You don’t need to strip the crackling off, but sadly, it will not be resurrected by any cooking method; it still tastes good, but if you’ve plenty of leftovers you might choose to remove it as I did here. Save any fat that renders out of the pork as you roast it to push the flavour of the pork in the stir fry up a notch.

Don’t keep your pot of tom yum paste (my favourite brand is Mae Ploy, which comes in a 400g tub you can keep for months in the fridge) just for tom yum soup. It makes a fantastic quick marinade for seafood, and works really well as a sauce ingredient. In this dish, it provides the spice and piquancy to make a great base for a sweet/sour style sauce, rather nicer than the mouth-puckering sort you’ll get at the local takeout because the sourness in the paste comes from lime and tamarind rather than white vinegar.

Rich pork and sweet peas work really well together. I’ve cooked this pork with sugary mange touts and sweet sugarsnap peas. If you can only get one kind of pea, substitute the other with frozen petits pois.

To serve 2-3 people, you’ll need:

500g leftover roast pork belly
200g mange tout peas
200g sugar snap peas
3 cloves garlic
10 spring onions, chopped
1 or 2 red chillies, to taste
1 tablespoon soft brown sugar
2 tablespoons tom yum paste
100ml Chinese rice wine
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
Juice of a lime
1 tablespoon rendered fat from the pork or flavourless oil to fry

Chop the pork into bite-sized pieces, and set aside. Chop the garlic finely and slice the spring onions and chillies.

Bring the pork fat or oil up to a high temperature in your wok, and throw in the garlic, chillies and spring onion with the sugar. Stir fry for about ten seconds, then add the pork to the pan with the tom yum paste, rice wine and soy sauce. Continue to stir fry for two minutes, then add the peas, pop a lid on the wok and leave to steam in the sauce for a couple of minutes while you put some rice out, until the peas are bright green and barely cooked.

Remove the stir fry to a warm serving dish, and add lime juice to taste. Serve immediately.

Posted on

Chicken and chorizo risotto

This is a very, very tasty use of all of those bits from a roast chicken that you don’t get round to eating on its first appearance on the table. I rather enjoy stripping a cold chicken carcass after a roast: popping the oysters out of the underside, shredding the meat from a leftover leg with my fingers, and spooning any jellied juices into a bowl with the scraps. Now, those bits of chicken will serve to make a very fine sandwich with plenty of salt and pepper, but you can also make them work a bit harder as part of a rich, creamy risotto for supper the next day.

The quality of your chicken stock here is all-important, and the risotto will be much better if yours is home-made. I like to buy those very cheap boxes of chicken wings and pop them in a stockpot with the stripped carcass, some aromatics (bay, carrots, shallot and celery), a covering of water and a slug of white wine. You can make a handsome amount of stock like this, and freeze what you don’t use immediately.

To serve four, you’ll need:

As much meat as you can save from a roast or poached chicken (I had a whole leg and thigh, and scraps from the breast and underside, but you’ll be fine with less meat)
1 dried chorizo ring
320g Carnaroli risotto rice
1 litre hot chicken stock
75ml vermouth
3 banana shallots, diced finely
2 sticks celery, diced finely
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
Zest of 1 lemon
75g frozen peas
60g grated parmesan cheese
30g butter
Salt and pepper

Chop the chorizo into coins, and each of those coins into quarters. While you cook the risotto, cook in a frying pan without oil until the chorizo is becoming crisp and the fat is running – once it reaches this stage, remove it from the heat and set aside.

In a large pan, saute the shallots and celery with the bay and fennel in the butter until the shallots are soft, but not taking on colour. Add the rice and continue sauteing over a low heat until the rice is coated with butter and looks translucent. Stir in the shredded chicken meat and pour over the vermouth, and stir until all the liquid is absorbed into the rice.

Add a ladle of the hot stock and simmer, stirring until the stock is absorbed. Add another ladle of stock and repeat until all the stock is absorbed into the rice, and the risotto is thick and creamy, the grains of rice al dente. This should take about 20 minutes. Stir in the lemon zest with the peas and parmesan, and check the seasoning, adjusting to taste. Remove from the heat and leave covered for 5 minutes.

Remove the lid and stir the chorizo with its oil through the risotto, reserving a few pieces to scatter over the top. Serve immediately.

Posted on

Indian rice pudding

My elderly rice cooker died earlier this year, and my lovely Mum and Dad forbade me to buy another one in the UK, where rice cookers are usually expensive and primitive. They happened to be visiting family in Malaysia over the summer and came back with creation’s most technologically advanced rice cooker – it’s digital and has fuzzy logic (I’m not exactly sure what that means); it has settings for congee, sushi, nasi lemak, brown rice, white rice, reheating and quick cooking; it works as a steamer for meat or veg; it keeps the rice hot and perfectly textured for as much as a day; and you can use it as a slow cooker. (It’s the Panasonic SR-MPA18 – good luck finding one outside SE Asia. I believe Panasonic also makes one that you can bake cakes in.) I love it, use it several times a week…and yesterday discovered that the fridge contained two bowls of leftover rice.

Cold rice in this house usually gets turned into fried rice, with the addition of some Chinese sausage, an egg and so forth. This time I fancied something different, and remembered the Indian mother of a schoolfriend who used to turn their leftover basmati rice into a very sweet, sticky rice pudding with milk, coconut milk and Indian spices in a frying pan. Here’s my attempt at something similar – I’m pretty sure that this is a long way from being authentic, but it’s close to what I remember my friend’s mother making, and it tasted great.

You’ll need:

250g leftover cooked basmati rice
275ml milk
50g palm sugar (use soft brown sugar if you can’t find palm sugar)
1 can coconut milk
5 cardamom pods
1 stick cinnamon, snapped in half
2 tablespoons sultanas
2 tablespoons mixed peel, plus extra to garnish

Put the rice in a frying pan with the sugar, spices, sultanas and peel, and pour the milk over. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook, stirring so the bottom doesn’t stick, until the mixture is thickening and the milk is being absorbed into the rice (5-10 minutes).

Spoon the coconut milk over the rice and continue to simmer over a very low heat, stirring now and then. The mixture will thicken as you go. When it reaches a dense, creamy consistency, take it off the heat and cover until cool. Divide into bowls and scatter each with a bit more mixed peel. This pudding is best eaten at room temperature, but you can also have it warm if you can’t wait!

Posted on

Bubble and squeak

Update, Jan 2009: Gordon Brown has just announced that bubble and squeak (or, specifically, rumbledethumps, the Scottish name for the dish) is his favourite meal. I’ve gone right off the stuff.

I mentioned to a group of friends from America that I was planning on cooking bubble and squeak for supper. They all chorused: “What the hell?” One said that the name suggested the boiling of mice. I suspect that this is one of those recipes which needs a short introduction.

Bubble and squeak is a traditional English supper dish made from the leftovers of a roast dinner. It should always contain potatoes and a brassica (I like spring cabbage for its sweetness, but other, more robust cabbages are often used, and some people like – gulp – Brussels sprouts). There is usually some meat – often whatever you roasted the night before, sometimes anointed with a little gravy. The idea is that first the potatoes and cabbage will have been boiled (bubble), and that when packed down hard into a sauté pan, the mixture should squeak.

What I cooked strayed pretty far from tradition – I didn’t used leftover boiled potatoes, but grated some raw ones, rosti-style. I didn’t have any leftovers from a roast, so I used some lovely smoky lardons of bacon and a dollop of beef dripping – a fat you can buy from your butcher in tubs and should always have in your fridge. Along with some sweet cabbage, spring onions and plenty of pepper and nutmeg, you’ve got a panful of fried English goodness fit for the Queen.

To serve four as an accompaniment for some good sausages, you’ll need:

6 medium potatoes
1 sweetheart cabbage
10 large spring onions (scallions)
150g smoked bacon lardons
2 tablespoons beef dripping
A generous grating of nutmeg
Salt and pepper

A note here – if you’re using leftover boiled potatoes, just mash them roughly into chunky bits with a fork before starting, rather than grating and squeezing them, and reduce the cooking time by five minutes on each side.

Put the lardons in a dry frying pan and cook over a medium temperature, turning occasionally, until golden (about ten minutes). Set aside.

Grate the potatoes. You don’t need to peel them first. The easiest and quickest way to do this is to use the grating blade on your food processor. Take handfuls of the grated potato and squeeze it hard over the kitchen sink. A lot of liquid will be forced out. Put the squeezed potato shreds in your largest mixing bowl and fluff them up with your fingers so they’re not in squeezed blocks any more – this will make mixing the other ingredients with them easier later on.

Shred the cabbage finely (a bread knife is, for some reason, much easier to shred a cabbage with than a cook’s knife). Shred the spring onions finely too. Use your hands to mix the cabbage, spring onions and lardons thoroughly with the potato, adding about a teaspoon of salt, a generous grating of nutmeg and plenty of freshly ground black pepper.

Heat a tablespoon of dripping in a large, non-stick frying pan over a high flame until it begins to shimmer. Pile the bubble and squeak mixture into the pan and use a spatula to push the mixture into a rosti-like patty, packing it down hard into the edges of the pan. Lower the flame to medium/low, and leave to cook for 20 minutes.

When 20 minutes are up, you’ll notice that the vegetables on the top surface of the bubble and squeak are turning translucent. Put a large plate on top of the frying pan and turn the whole arrangement upside-down, so the bubble and squeak turns out neatly onto the plate. Turn the heat back up, add the remaining tablespoon of dripping and, when it is shimmering, slide the bubble and squeak back into the pan, uncooked side down, turn the heat down to low and cook for 20 minutes.

Serve with some good butchers’ sausages and some apple sauce, preferably while wearing a bowler hat or other symbol of Britishness.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

South-Asian spiced fishcakes

My Mum recited this recipe, which she had just conjured from thin air, down the telephone the other evening. I’m always in the market for good store-cupboard recipes, and this sounded excellent: something to use up that can of good, fatty fish; some mellow and fiery curry spices; last night’s mashed potato; the eggs left over from my last cake; and some of the herbs clogging the fridge. This is a recipe where you need a canned fish rather than something fresh; it’s rich and moist but flaky, which is exactly what you require here.

I love Mummy’s fishcakes. They made a regular appearance on the table when I was a little girl, and since then she’s refined and tweaked them into something quite fantastic. They’re also very quick to prepare if you have some mashed potato hanging around, so next time you prepare some as an accompaniment, make a pound or so extra so you can try these the next day.

The little patties are dusted with cornflour to make them crisp and golden; we eat them with rice and some very serious feelings of gratitude. For about 16 fishcakes you’ll need:

1 can Alaskan red salmon (I went for Alaskan salmon because I’d just been reading Legerdenez, a perfume blog from Alaska which I commend to you – if you’re not in the mood for salmon, a good fatty tuna will also do well.)
6 small shallots
4 cloves garlic
1 large handful fresh coriander
1 ½ teaspoons curry powder (I use Bolsts)
1 red chilli
Zest of 1 lime
1 ½ tablespoons grated fresh ginger
2 eggs
1 lb mashed potato
1 teaspoon salt
Cornflour to dust
Butter and olive oil to fry

Put all the fishcake ingredients except the potato in the blender, and blitz until everything is roughly chopped. (The fish is quite salty already, so be careful not to oversalt.) Remove to a mixing bowl and use your hands to combine everything until well-blended.

Shape the mixture into patties the size of your palm, and dip in cornflour. Refrigerate for half an hour, then fry for five minutes each side until golden. Serve with rice and a sweet chilli sauce, or a wedge of lime .

Posted on

Pasta alla Medici

Now, while I might rail against Nigella Lawson’s approach to ham in cola, I am full of gratitude for her inclusion in Feast of a recipe for Pasta alla Medici, using any remaining ham you might have from the chunk you boiled the hell out of the day before. I’d last eaten it decades ago, and had been looking for a recipe ever since.

When I was twelve or so, a pamphlet was deposited on our school desks. It came from a company (pre-Internet, this) which would fix you up with a penfriend in a foreign country, depending on which boxes you ticked. (I don’t recall an ‘eating’ box to tick under the ‘hobbies’ heading; I think I ticked something typically precocious along the lines of ‘classical music’ and ‘visiting museums’. It is not surprising that girls on the school bus used to save pockets full of breakfast cereal to put in my hair every morning.)

There were also boxes to tick on the age, nationality and gender of your desired penfriend. Being newly possessed of all kinds of exciting hormones, and also possessed of a very overactive imagination, I decided that the thing every twelve-year-old English schoolgirl required for a full and satisfying life was a seventeen-year-old, Italian, male penfriend.

Fortunately, the penfriend company saw me coming, and allotted me a twelve-year-old girl. She was Italian, though, and she liked reading and music too, so we suited one another rather well, and wrote to each other (in English; my Italian remains limited to deciphering menus and asking the way to the museum) for years.

Eventually, Lisa and I had been writing to one another for such a long time that our parents decided we should visit each other. Her family lived in a beautiful flat in Genoa, where I went to school with her for a couple of weeks and discovered marron glace ice cream (my Mum had sent me to Italy saying sagely: ‘in Italy you can buy ice cream in every colour of the rainbow’, and I must have annoyed the hell out of Lisa’s family by obsessing about finding one in each colour).

Lisa’s Mum was a doctor, and didn’t have much time at home. When she was at home, she was not, in retrospect, a very engaged cook, and the Findus Crispy Pancake was my introduction to an Italian mother’s kitchen. Later that week we ate bollito misto (which translates roughly as ‘mixed boilings’, and was about as appetising as it sounds).

One thing, though, that Lisa’s mother cooked and cooked exceptionally well, was a really fabulous pasta dish, with sweet little peas, ham, and a creamy, buttery parmesan sauce. I asked her what it was called (although not for the recipe; my own mother didn’t like me cooking at home, since I did what I do now and sprayed the walls with food when cooking), and was delighted when she cooked it again twice before I left.

Pasta alla Medici is a very simple recipe, but is also, for some reason, a very hard one to find in books. I had to wait nearly twenty years before I came across Nigella Lawson’s recipe, and I am gushingly, pathetically grateful. She offers this three-person recipe as one which children will enjoy, and her portions are child-sized – make a larger amount if you’re feeding adults.

200g pasta
100g frozen petits pois
150ml double cream
150g diced ham
2 tablespoons grated Parmesan

Cook the pasta following the packet instructions, and after five minutes add the peas to the pasta water. When the peas and pasta are cooked, drain them. Warm the rest of the ingredients through in the pan you cooked the pasta in, then add the pasta and peas, toss to coat, and serve.

I added a few gratings of nutmeg to Nigella’s recipe. I also stripped some of the white fat off the ham I had cooked the day before and dry-fried it until crisp, adding a tablespoon of maple syrup and a pinch of cinnamon at the end, bubbling the syrup down to a caramel. I used this crisp, sweet crackling to dress the pasta. This is, however, mostly because I am greedy; you’ll probably be perfectly happy just eating the pasta on its own.