Day 12: a picture of something you love

I love the gnocchi bolognese recipe we got off a card from Waitrose.


Paraphrased, the instructions on the back say:

• 500g beef mince
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1-2 cloves of garlic (aka lots)
• 250g mushrooms, chopped / sliced
• 440g jar tomato and herb pasta sauce
• 500g gnocchi (potato is best)
• 350g tub cheese sauce
• 50g grated mozzarella, or whatever tickles your fancy.

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees C / gas mark 4. Fry beef, onion and garlic until onion starts to soften.

2. Stir in mushrooms and cook for a further 5-6 mins until meat is browned. Pour the pasta sauce over, bring to the boil, season with black pepper, then cover and simmer for 15 mins.

3. Meanwhile cook the gnocchi according to packet instructions. Drain well.

4. Spoon half the Bolognese mixture into an ovenproof dish. Top with the gnocchi. Add the remaining Bolognese mixture, spoon the cheese sauce over the top, sprinkle with the mozzarella/whatever.

5. Bake on the top shelf for 30-35 minutes. Serve with salad and an excellent red wine.

Occasional recipes: Spicy bacon and pepper pasta

This comes to you courtesy of Ready Steady Cook and is what we had on Christmas Eve. The original plan was to have a suitably Scandinavian ham-based Yule feast, until we saw the price of ham. Bacon is equally pig-derived and a lot cheaper.

The original recipe is for 1, so scale up according to the number of diners. Lifted verbatim from the BBC:

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 3 rashers streaky bacon, chopped
• 1 red pepper, chopped
• ¼ leek, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• pinch chilli flakes
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 150g fresh pasta, cooked according to packet instructions (We went for tagliatelle.)
• handful basil, chopped

Fry the bacon in the oil. (Opinion varies in our household over this, one member maintaining that when you fry bacon its own fat is all the oil you need. The other, i.e. me and the one doing the cooking, maintains that a bit of olive oil will liven anything. So anyway.)

Add everything else and cook for a few minutes, then stir in the cooked pasta and basil and serve. Simple! The red pepper makes the whole thing exactly moist enough, and the colours - red pepper, green basil, white pasta - make the whole thing look good and Christmassy. This was an unintended effect but still a good one.

Occasional recipes: Paprika chicken with spicy red cabbage and beetroot

Haven't done one of these for a very long time. I still feel a traitor to the childhood me when I serve up something with beetroot in it but trust me, it's actually quite nice. Under the right circumstances. I.e. not boiled to within an inch of its life, like at school.

H'anyway:

• 3-4 chicken breast fillets. (If you get absolute slabs, like I did, experience shows you might want to slice them into thinner slabs ...)
• 1 red onion, sliced
• 400g red cabbage, finely shredded nuked by food processor
• 1 tsp crushed chillies
• 250g beetroot, chopped. (Instructions from Waitrose say "fresh, scrubbed, trimmed and cut into matchsticks." Ben says chopped. And have something to catch the drips, because opening and cutting up cooked beetroot is what badly planned open heart surgery must look like.)
• paprika
• 75g creme fraiche

Dust chicken breasts with paprika. Make several deep scores diagonally across the meat and fry chicken pieces in olive oil, scored side down. Reduce the heat to lowest setting and fry for 20 minutes, turning halfway through. (Be aware that the Waitrose notion of "lowest setting" might still be substantially higher than what your cooker goes down to.)

Meanwhile fry onion for about 5 minutes, add cabbage and chillies and cook for a further 5 minutes.

Add the beetroot, cover and cook for about 10 minutes.

Pile cabbage onto warmed serving plates, place a chicken fillet on top of each. Stir creme fraiche +1 tbsp water into pan juices, heat until bubbling and pour on top of chicken. Serve with buttered new potatoes.

At school I always found beetroot insufferably bland and often still do, despite my eyes having been opened as to the miracle that is borscht by a student trip to Moscow in 1987. But that same blandness and texture nicely complement and counteract the chillies. Trust me.

And if you can, follow this up with your wife's apple and mince pie.

Occasional recipes: chicken with brown things

I must credit Teresa Nielsen-Hayden with this one, but her version on Making Light provides three full meals. Here's how to make one meal for three people.

Take:

• a couple of chicken breasts
• 150g Israeli couscous. [I hadn't met this before but the grains are noticeably bigger than normal couscous. Couldn't find it in Tesco: Best Beloved had to get Mediterranean couscous from Waitrose. As I believe Israel is right next to the Mediterranean, this obviously sufficed.]
• 1 onion
• 1/2 cup chopped cashew nuts [well, whole cashew nuts zapped a couple of times in the food processor. Teresa goes for hazelnuts but, hey.]
• 1 small handful mixed dried mushrooms
• 1/2 cup dry sherry

Soak the mushrooms in a pint of boiling water for at least half an hour. Then chop them up, but keep the water they soaked in. Also make yourself two pints of stock: chicken or vegetable will do.

Lightly fry the couscous in oil to brown it. I've not done this before but Teresa said, so why not? Honestly can't tell if it made a difference, though ... Do likewise with the nuts. Also fry the onions. Chop up the chicken and brown well and good in oil.

Whether you do all this in series or parallel is a function of time, cooking utensils and oven top space. What matters is that at some point you have browned chicken, mushrooms, nuts and onions which you can bung altogether with the mushroom broth into a wok. Simmer on medium heat for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, add the couscous and simmer for a further 15.

This is when you want that extra stock, because the couscous soaks up liquid like there's no tomorrow. In the remaining 15 minutes I got through the full 2 pints. I could maybe have simmered it a bit longer because it was only a little bit sloppy. But not very.

Teresa says season to taste while it’s simmering and suggests sage, oregano, basil, salt, pepper, and a pinch of smoked sweet paprika. I didn't use any of those because frankly the mushroom broth makes it strong and salty enough. However, shortly before it's done, add the dry sherry.

Wash down with red wine and Best Beloved's delicious lemon sponge layer pudding, but that recipe is not mine to share.

Occasional recipes: Flying Jacob

Flying who?

I know, I know. Sometimes I wonder whether Swedish cuisine is in fact a very clever, straight-faced joke on the rest of the world. Do our Volvo-driving, Abba-crooning cousins really tuck in regularly to pickled herring with creme fraiche, boiled potatoes and lingonberry sauce? Or do they just wait until one of them brings home a Brit who wants to marry her and really, really wants to impress his prospective inlaws?

Anyway, Flying Jacob/Flygande Jakob is a dish that includes those traditional Swedish food items bananas, chili, peanuts and rice. Oh, and chicken and bacon. We got the recipe from Swedish Mike, an exiled Swede who lives in Abingdon and blogs strange recipes at www.freestylecookery.com. I won't steal a fellow blogger's thunder, so here I'll just list the ingredients with our variations. To serve four:

• 4 portions cooked white rice
• 6 - 8 rashers of smoked streaky bacon
• 4 skin- and boneless chicken breasts, cut into bitesized pieces
• 3 ripe bananas, sliced
• 125 ml chili sauce (or spicy ketchup) [we used chili & garlic sauce from Tesco: strong but worth it]
  
• 350 ml single cream [cream was left off the shopping list to an administrative error: we made up the fluid difference with a 50/50 mix of milk and natural yoghurt. In my opinion this worked perfectly: I wouldn't want it to be richer/creamier than it was.]
  
• Peanuts [regular salted]
  

As to how to cook all this, see how Swedish Mike does it, and do likewise. You won't go far wrong. The overall effect is very Thai or Indonesian: the different flavours - yes, even the bananas - work together astonishingly well.

Occasional recipes: fish with a chorizo crust

Originally from The Hairy Bikers, whence this is lifted with my annotations. Very rich and of course totally missing the point about eating on fish on Friday to be penitential. Anyway:

Ingredients

• ½ lime, juice only [half a Tesco lime produces about 3 microns of fluid. A whole lime. Much better.]
  
• 4 firm white fish fillets (not steaks) such as haddock, monkfish or cod
• 150g/5½oz day-old white bread, crusts removed
• 250g/9oz cured chorizo, skinned and chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, finely sliced [as usual they totally underestimate. I used 4. Minimum.]
  
• 1 unwaxed lime, zest only
• 2 tbsp flatleaf parsley
• 2 tbsp parmesan cheese
• ½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 50g/2oz butter
• lime wedges, to serve [put another way, you need at least two limes, one to juice and zest, one to get the wedges from. I forgot this last night and only got one lime, so sacrificed the wedges. Not such a big deal, except that the bread/chorizo crust is very rich and you really need the extra lime juice to cut through it.]
  

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4.
2. For the fish, pour the lime juice over the fish fillets. Leave for half an hour while you prepare the crust.
3. For the crust, cut the bread into chunks and place in a roasting tin. Place the chorizo on top of the bread.
4. Transfer to the oven and cook for 15 minutes. As the heat increases, the fat from the sausage will run into the bread chunks. Remove from the oven and leave to cool.
5. Once cool, place the bread and sausage into a blender or food processor and pulse until the mixture resembles fine crumbs [whee! They go round and round! Again!]. Add the garlic, lime zest, parsley, parmesan and freshly ground black pepper. Process again to combine the ingredients.
6. Place the fish, along with the juices, skin-side down in a roasting tin. Press on a thick layer, about 0.5cm, of the crust.
7. Cut the butter into small cubes and dot over the crust.
8. Tightly cover the roasting tin with foil and bake the fish in the preheated oven for 15-20 minutes.
9. Serve with chips or [barbarians] new potatoes and a rocket salad, and the lime wedges.

Occasional recipes: Marilyn Monroe's Chicken Cacciatore

I have no idea if this really is Marilyn Monroe's recipe (or variation hereon), but why would iON Oxford Tube, the Oxford Tube's inflight magazine, lie to me? Anyway, this comes from page 21 of issue 3, apparently winter 2009, though I'd have said in March 2009 that's impossible and winter 2008 was probably what they meant.

Anyhoo. They say/ [I say]:

• 4 chicken quarters [or 2 drumsticks each]
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• crashed black pepper and salt
• 1 yellow pepper, sliced
• 1 small chopped onion
• 2 cloves chopped garlic [um, 5, I think it was]
• 1 glass dry white wine. [A glass? Just what the heck is a glass in official terms of measurement? I dunno, so I gave it exactly one wine glass full and it seemed to work.]
• 2 tbsp white wine vinegar
• 1 cup chicken stock. [Cup? See remark about glasses of white wine. Best Beloved suggested about half a pint and again it seemed to work.]
• 1/2 tsp crumbled oregano [omitted in favour of lemon thyme, that being what we had to hand]
• 2 bay leaves [simply omitted]
• 1 cup finely chopped mushrooms [here we go again ... I just went with my judgement of what looked like a good quantity]
• 1 can peeled tomatoes, juice reserved [whatever that means. I put the whole lot in and, you guessed it, it seemed to work]
• 2 tbsp fresh, torn basil leaves [see bay leaves above]
• 1 tbsp slivered black olives [I don't think I've ever had a slivered olive in my life. Black olives! Whole! Lots of them!]
  
• 3 anchovy fillets [a tin from Tesco has more than 3 and did fine]
• freshly grated parmesan [so much nicer than the pre-ground type you get in sprinkler cans which smells of sick]

Season the chicken with blackpepper and salt. Heat olive oil unilt a haze forms over it, then saute the chicken until skin goes golden brown. Transfer onto a plate.

[I know from experience that this will just fill the kitchen with chickeny olive oily smoke. Instead I roast the chicken pieces for 30 mins at gas mark 5. Meanwhile ...]

Saute the yellow pepper, add onion and garlic and cook for 8-10 minutes [more like 5]. Add the vinegar to deglaze the pan, then add the white wine and boil until the jucie is reduced to about 1/4 glass. Add black pepper, pour in chicken stock, turn down to low, add tomatoes and half their juice [or, as I say, the whole lot], oregano, bay leaf, half the basil [if you're having any of this] and the mushrooms.

Return the chicken to the pan, cover, reduce heat and simmer for 30 mins. Transfer the chicken onto a plate.

To the sauce add the black olives, remaining basil and anchovies. Stir and cook for two minutes. Spoon over the chicken and sprinkle with parmesan. Serve with buttered spaghetti.

[Now, at this point I want to know why I have never heard of buttered spaghetti before. Where has it been all my life? Just think of it. Roll the words around on your tongue. Buttered ... spaghetti. It's spaghetti, and it's buttered. Got that? Buttered spaghetti. I have just done you a greater favour than you can possibly imagine.]

And, wow. If Norma Jean was in the habit of cooking that little lot up then she wasn't half as dumb as she appeared. It's rich, make no mistake, but with a range of flavours jostling for attention and each one pointing out to you what an utterly fabulous meal this is. Go to it, people.

And remember, buttered spaghetti.

Occasional recipes: honey mustard pork chops with peppercorn

This one comes from the BBC Food site (apparently Mike Robinson from Saturday Kitchen), with adaptation.

Ingredients
1 tbsp wholegrain mustard
1 tsp runny honey
2 pork chops
50g/2oz butter
1 red onion, halved and sliced
2 Golden Delicious apples, peeled, cored and cut into 8 slices
200g/7oz new potatoes, lightly cooked and halved
1 tsp wholegrain mustard
6 shredded fresh sage leaves

For the sauce
3 finely chopped shallots
1 tbsp green peppercorns
small glass cider
100ml/3½fl oz double cream

I've done this a few times before with the drawbacks that (a) Bonusbarn doesn't like it and (b) the original recipe suggests griddling the chops for 6 minutes each side with the honey mustard sauce already slathered on them. This means you do the rest through a haze of pork flavoured smoke.

Oven roasting the chops takes longer but makes them much nicer. Cover and roast for 1 hour in an oven at gas mark 4, over a tray full of water to keep them moist. Mix the honey and mustrad together and, at the 55 minute mark, paste it over the chops, then return them to the oven for another five minutes.

Before that, stick to what the original recipe said:

• Melt some butter, add the onions and apples and cook for 2-3 minutes.
• Add the potatoes and another teaspoon of mustard.
• For the peppercorn sauce, melt some butter in another pan, add shallots and peppercorns and cook for a minute. Add a splash of cider and bring to the boil, then add the double cream and cook until it thickens
• Serve it all together. Pork chops lovely and moist, sauce deliciously creamy, potatoes and apples adding body and interesting flavours to the mix. Yum.
  

So that's Thanksgiving

Mashed potatoes with turkey? I know, shocking.

We have an American vicar, for reasons I've never quite gathered. (I know why we have a vicar, because we're that kind of church, and I know why he's American because you don't really get a choice in that when your parents are American and you're born in Pittsburgh. I've just not yet quite understood how he ended up here, but I'm very glad he did because he's a great guy.)

Last night we commorated the fact with an American-style Thanksgiving dinner: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, corn bread, peas and sweetcorn. All ingredients genuinely American, acquired somehow from a US airforce base. And the menu ...

The vicar explained beforehand that American palates are not quite the same as British ones. They don't draw the same distinctions between sweet and savoury. And how! The corn bread is essentially dry Victoria sponge. It could have served with the sweet potato casserole as our dessert - except of course that dessert was pumpkin pie and pecan pie. (I was surprised to hear how many people present had never had pumpkin pie - I've had it often thanks to my mother's cooking at home. Never had pecan pie, though.) I think the Americans must have invented cranberry sauce in a desperate attempt to drag it at least a little over to the savoury side of the taste spectrum.

But I quibble. This was my first Thanksgiving dinner and very nice it was too. It certainly whetted my appetite for the real thing in 25 days time ...

Occasional recipes: chicken that is really pork with mushrooms

The first requirement for this is to get a recipe card from Waitrose for chicken with mushrooms, then note that you had chicken two days earlier and could do with a change. So what the hell, make it pork instead.

The second is to cook it on Jeans for Genes day, meaning everyone at work has a cake bake and you come home laden with pieces of delicious chocolate and coffee cake, so you can scoff them down for dessert.

Anyway.

• 1 ready to cook chicken breast joint (a.k.a. 3 pork chops)
• 250g asparagus
• 100g mushrooms, sliced
• 1 tbsp dijon mustard
• 3 tbsp vegetable stock
• 4 tbsp creme fraiche
• 20g chopped parsley
• 1 sweet potato

All the above quantities apart from the chops are intended for two, so to serve three, round up to whatever seems like a good approximation.

1. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees/gas mark 5 and roast chicken for 50 mins (or preheat to 175 degrees/gas mark 4 and roast chops for an hour. Put them on a rack in a shallow roasting tin, fill with water but not enough to touch the chops, and cover with foil. I've no idea why the water - I just looked up how to roast pork chops and that is what Mr Google told me).

2. Ten minutes before the chicken/pork is ready, drizzle olive oil over asparagus on a baking tray and add it to the oven.

3. Meanwhile, fry the mushrooms in olive oil for a couple of minutes, then add mustard and stock and stir in.

4. Add creme fraiche and stir in with the parsley.

Serve the chops with the sauce, roasted asparagus and sweet potato wedges which you have been quietly roasting for the last 35-40 minutes, having parboiled them for ten minutes before that. This is why you should always read the entire recipe before starting. I may write to whoever does the Waitrose recipe cards and point out that putting a key starting point last in the instructions would just be asking for trouble with a less careful cook ...

Oh, and here's another tip. If you have a baking tray sitting on top of the oven, and one corner is sticking into the flame beneath a saucepan, and you want to pick it up, try not to let the bit that was sticking into the flame touch your thumb. Or you may have cause to utter rude words and spend ten minutes with your hand beneath a cold water tap, then get a blister that stretches from the base of your thumb to the joint. Just saying.

Occasional recipes: chicken fricassee

This one really was a pleasant surprise. Though it's reasonably lengthy, everything is quite sequential with no sudden surprises like "now add in the mushrooms that you marinaded for 24 hours earlier". Also, because a fricassee is a white stew, the instructions were heavy on not letting anything burn or even get brown. I was mostly successful.

So, from The Cook's Recipe Collection:

• 60g butter
• 3 chicken legs, skinned [to serve 4, they say 1.4 kg chicken quartered & skinned]
• 570ml / 1 pint chicken stock
• grated rind and juice of 1/2 lemon
• 1 bouquet garni [had no idea what this was so just added chopped lemon thyme at the required moment]
• 12-16 button onions
• 340g mushrooms, whole or chopped if large
• 2 egg yolks
• 90ml double cream
• 3 tbsps milk (optional) [which is as well because I forgot]
• 2 tbsps chopped fresh parsley
• lemon slices to garnish [also optional/forgotten]

Melt 45g of the butter and cook the chicken (one piece at a time if necessary) until no longer pink. Don't let it get brown. When sufficiently cooked, remove from pan and set aside.

Stir the flour into the butter bit by bit over a low heat, stirring continuously, until it's all a pale straw colour. Remove pan from heat and gradually stir in the stock. When all blended smoothly, add lemon rind and juice. Return to heat and bring to boil, whisking constantly. Simmer for 1 minute.

Return the chicken to the pan and add the bouquet garni [if you've worked out what one of those is; just add the thyme if not]. The sauce should almost cover the chicken [so I added a further 1/3pint of stock]. Bring to the poil, cover pan and simmer for 40 minutes.

Melt remaining button in a pan, add the onions, cover and cook gently for 10 minutes. Don't let them brown! Remove onions with a slotted spoon [i.e. leaving the juice behind] and add to the chicken. Cook the mushrooms in the remaining butter and add to the chicken 10 minutes before the end.

Transfer chicken to a serving plate and remove the bouquet garni. Recipe then says to skim the sauce of any fat and boil to reduce by half; Ben says there's not much fat and it's already quite thick enough.

Blend the egg yolks and cream together and whisk in several spoonfuls of the hot sauce. Return the mixture to the remaining sauce and cook gently for 2-3 minutes. Stir constantly and don't let it boil. If it is very thick, add the milk [ah, that's what I didn't do]. Stir in the parsley.

At this point Ben's serving style takes over: plonk a bed of couscous on each plate, put a piece of chicken on top of it, and spoon the sauce over. Or you can do what the book says: put the chicken pieces in a serving dish and spoon the sauce over it.

Serves four if you do it their way, three quite comfortably if you do it mine.

Occasional recipes: baked Spanish risotto

This is Silvana Franco's recipe from BBC Food. Serves 4.

Ingredients

• 250g cherry tomatoes
• 1 red onion, finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped [as usual the garlic is hugely underestimated. Five, minimum.]
  
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 300g risotto rice [if you can GET risotto rice. But Tesco easy cook rice works just as well.]
  
• 4 chicken thigh fillets, halved [or even just chicken thighs, not filleted.]
  
• 200g/7oz chorizo, thickly sliced [it comes in packs of thin slices so bung it all in. From the one time we did use a proper bit of chorizo, you have to remember to remove the skin ...]
  
• 2 tsp chopped fresh rosemary [optional, i.e. we didn't have any, which was an oversight on our part because it grows in Tesco carpark.]
  
• 1¾ pints hot chicken stock
• pinch of saffron strands [also optional, and to my knowledge this doesn't grow in Tesco]
  
• 8 large, raw prawns [or a pack of small cooked and peeled prawns from, yes, Tesco ...]
  
• salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 220C/425F/Gas 7. Place the cherry tomatoes in a roasting tin and sprinkle over the red onion, garlic and olive oil. Roast for 20 minutes until the tomatoes are softened.
2. Stir in the rice, chicken, chorizo, rosemary, chicken stock, saffron and some salt and pepper, mixing well together [and listening to The Now Show]. Return to the oven for 20 minutes.
3. Stir in the prawns and return to the oven for a further 10 minutes until the rice is tender and the chicken is cooked through.

This one bulks out very nicely - plus, okay, there were three people eating a meal for four. The prawns, the tomatoes and the chorizo give it three distinct background flavours that combine nicely. Very Mediterranean.

Occasional recipes: chocolate mousse

From The Cook's Recipe Collection, ISBN 1-85833-441-1. Serves 6.

• 175g dark chocolate
• 75ml/5 tbsps water
• 15g butter
• 2 tbsps rum [we used brandy, which works just as well. Might need a bit more than 2 tbsps because we couldn't really taste it.]
• 3 eggs, separated

1. Break the chocolate into small pieces and combine with the water in a bowl over a pan of boiling water. Remove when it's all melted to form a thick cream.
2. Beat the butter into the warm chocolate. Add the rum/brandy. Beat in the yolks one at a time.
3. Whisk the egg whites until stiff and fold into the chocolate mixture. Pour into small pots/ramekins/wine glasses/whatever [wine glasses in our case]
4. Chill overnight. Finish with whatever kind of decoration you like - in our case, a glace cherry and grated chocolate.

So, apart from the "chill overnight" bit, a very quick and easy recipe, easily adaptable to experimentation. For instance, it would probably work just as well with white chocolate. Or - now here's a thought - dark and white chocolate, layered. Use any kind of liqueur takes your fancy. The recipe also suggested using strong coffee instead of water - possibly a step too far - or flavouring the mixture with orange rind. All in all and generally speaking - yum.

Occasional recipes: pork with creamed leeks

Not done one of these for a while. This one is by James Martin from Ready Steady Cook. His recipe serves 1 so we rounded it all up for a family of three.

For the pork:

• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 450g pork [if from Tesco, then obviously ethically sourced pork that has made a living will and signed all the right consent forms]
• salt and pepper

For the leeks:

• 3 tsp olive oil [actually I've only just noticed he says tsp. I used tbsps and it was pretty good]
• knob unsalted butter [if that's your thing]
• 3 garlic cloves [we used 5]
• some thyme [resist jokes about have you got the thyme, last of the thyme lords, etc.]
  
• 150ml milk
• 450ml double cream [we only used 300ml as that was what was in the carton. Works fine.]
• fresh parsley, chopped [optional, i.e. couldn't find any]

1. Preheat the oven to 220C/425F/gas mark 7
2. For the pork, heat the oil in a non-stick frying pan. Season the pork and sear in the hot pan for 1-2 minutes on each side. Transfer to the oven and cook for 8-10 minutes, or until cooked through.
3. For the leeks, heat the oil and butter in a pan and sauté the garlic with the leek and thyme leaves for 3-4 minutes, to soften.
4. Stir in the milk, cream and parsley, then reduce the heat and simmer gently for a further 6-8 minutes, stirring occasionally.
5. Remove the pork from the oven and allow to rest. Slice on the diagonal.

Then:

• James Martin says: spoon the creamed leeks onto a serving plate and top with the sliced pork.
• Ben says: Mix the creamed leeks and sliced pork together. Make a bed of couscous on each plate. Ladle out the leek/pork mixture, with broccoli on the side.

A word about couscous. This has been one of the many new experiences to which marriage has opened my eyes. It's so easy. Pour it into a saucepan, with a generous lashing of olive oil and cover with recently boiled water. Put the lid on and leave for a couple of minutes. Remove the lid and all the water has gone. Fluff it up and serve it. The olive oil adds a lovely background flavour and it wil soak up any sauce-intensive food you care to use.

I once had a meal, or should I say, it once had me

Think of everything you would normally associate with a greasy spoon cafe. Fried everything. Formica tabletops pretending to be tiled. Tatty wipe-clean menus. Questionable hygiene.

Now, throw out all the bad preconceptions and what's left is ...


... Norwegian Wood, Glen Fern Road, Bournemouth, which for some reason chooses to call itself a coffee lounge. I'm coining a new phrase: it's a greasy spoon without the grease. It's a grease-free spoon.

The food is cheap, plentiful and good. Apparently the Boy's father liked to eat there and I can see why. Yes, most of what's on offer is fried, but it's not swimming in fat; the place also does jacket potatoes and all that; and it even caters for veggies. Not that any of that had any bearing on my cheese and ham omelette with chips. Or my knickerbocker glory.

It's clean and pleasant inside; the staff are friendly; and instead of the fake formica it goes in for wood. Real, honest to God rough hewn wood (which sits strangely next to the plastic chairs).


In short, should you be passing through Bournemouth and feeling like a cheap and cheerful bite, this is the place.

As is hinted by the name of the place, they're into the Beatles ... The walls are lined with them. Photos. Pictures. Paintings. Paintings and pictures of photos. And so on. Also one, strangely, of David Bowie - I didn't ask why. Maybe he ate there.

End restaurant review, commence concluding thought.

Today would have been the Boy's father's birthday so were down in Bournemouth to view and sit ceremonially on his memorial bench at the crematorium, and conduct sundry other business. By "we" I mean me (the driver), Best Beloved and Ex Mother in Law in Law. The Boy decided he had had enough and stayed away ... which was disappointing for the others but to my surprise I told them I found I was on his side. He saw his dad's ashes being scattered and as far as he's concerned it's time to move on rather than revisit old scenes. As would I, I think. When my parents go - and given that they occasionally read this blog, I suppose this counts as due notice - I will pay attention to the proceedings up to and including scattering the ashes, but after that life will continue. If they want memorials, they'll need to provide instructions and an appropriate sum of money. I will also expect nothing more of my own bereaved when my turn comes.

Just so you know!

Occasional recipes: Beef with broccoli

This one, with astonishing ingenuity, is essentially beef with broccoli, though you'd never guess it behind the impenetrable title.

From The Cook's Recipe Collection:

• 460g rump steak
• 8 tbsp dark soy sauce
• 2 tbsp cornflour
• 2 tsp sherry
• 225g broccoli
• 1" root ginger, freshly peeled
• 6 tbsp oil
• salt & pepper

Trim any fat from the meat and cut into thin strips along the grain.

Combine the meat with the soy sauce, cornflour, sherry and sugar.

Trim the broccoli into florets. Slice the ginger into thin slices.

Stir fry the broccoli until dark green, for a max. of 2 minutes, sprinkling with salt beforehand (it says, though I neglected the salt and it tasted fine). Set aside.

Stir fry the ginger and beef mixture for about 2 minutes. Return the broccoli to the mix, heat through for about 30 seconds and serve. Which in our case was on a bed of couscous but could be with noodles or whatever takes your fancy.

Preparation takes about 25 mins, cooking takes about five. Peasy!

Occasional recipes: Piquant Pork Chops

More from The Cook's Recipe Collection

• Pork chops [though loin steaks are similar and don't have those pesky bones]
• 1 chopped onion
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 tbsp mustard powder
• 2 tsp tomato puree
• 1/2 pint beef stock
• 1 tbsp Worcester sauce
• 2 tbsps fresh lemon juice

1. Heat some oil, brown chops on both sides. Remove from the pan and place in an overproof dish or casserole.
2. Fry the onion until lightly browned.
3. Stir in sugar, mustard powder and puree. [If you have previously mixed sugar and mustard powder together, battle evil temptation when stepson indicates intention of eating the mixture. Resist and warn him off.] Add stock and bring to the boil.
4. Stir in Worcester sauce and lemon juice. Season to taste.
5. Pour over chops and cook in an oven at gas mark 4 for 40-45 minutes until the meat is tender.
6. Optional: if your stepson has gone out to feed his grandmother's neighbour's cats, and still hasn't come back, move food to lower down in the oven. All that happens is the meat gets even more tender. When he eventually saunters back home and asks "when's food ready?", reply "in minus twenty minutes."

Goes well with couscous, especially as there's a lot of sauce to soak up. Also goes well (under slight protest) with the first batch of sprouts for the year, mainly because you can smother them in sauce-soaked couscous and they taste quite decent. Oddly.

Occasional recipes: Chicken with Olives

Of course, you could take away the olives and just call this ... chicken.

From The Cook's Recipe Collection, compiled by Jillian Stewart, ISBN 1-85833-441-1

• 2 tbsps olive oil
• 30g butter
• bits of chicken [recommends 3lb to serve 4-6. We just used three thighs to serve 3.]
  
• 1 clove garlic [oh come on - 3 minimum]
• 1/4 pint white wine
• 1/4 pint chicken stock
• 4 courgettes [2 sufficed nicely], trimmed & cut into 1.25cm pieces
• as many pitted olives as you care to mention
• 2 tbsps chopped parsley

Heat the oil, add the butter. When they're foaming, add the chicken skin-side down. Brown one side, then turn over to brown the other.

Turn the chicken skin-side up and add the garlic, wine, stock, and salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, cover the pan and allow to simmer for a further 30mins or so over a gentle heat. The bits of bird are about half submerged in the resulting sauce, which thickens quite nicely, and go very tender.

Add the courgettes and cook for a further ten minutes. Add the olives, cook to heat through, add the parsley and serve. We had it with rice which absorbs the sauce very nicely. The courgettes don't go all soft and squishy but do absorb the chicken flavour.

Optional: for dessert, for the third week running, use Tesco ready mix cheesecake mixture because your stepson can't be bothered to tax his braincells with anything more time consuming. Resist urge to punch air and go "yes!" when he asks if we can have a different dessert next week.

Occasional recipes: mushroom and potato pie

From The Colour Library Book of Vegetarian Cooking, published by - um - Colour Library Books, with our own embellishments based on our previous enjoyment of the dish last year.

Take:

• 400g mushrooms (book says 350)
  
• 3 celery stalks
• 1 onion
• as many cloves of garlic as you're comfortable with (book doesn't say any, but come on!)
  
• 40g flour
• 2 tsp paprika
• 1 tsp thyme (ignored 'cos we don't have any)
  
• 1/2 pint milk
• 2-3 teaspoons lemon juice (or just juice half a lemon)
  
• 850g potatoes (book says 750, which is too thin)
• 6 tablespoons milk
• more paprika

Simmer spuds for 20 minutes to make tender.

Fry chopped onion, celery and garlic for five minutes in butter, then add mushrooms and cook for a further 2 minutes. (The celery is particularly important as it gives the Boy something to do, i.e. carefully pick it all out of his helping before eating.)

Sprinkle flour over mushroom mixture, stir, add paprika and (allegedly) thyme. Remove from heat, stir in milk, return to heat until sauce thickens. Remove again and stir in lemon juice. Season to taste and set aside.

Mash potatoes with milk and butter. (Also a previously cooked and skinned artichoke, for interesting additional flavour. Remember to drain properly in something like a colander. Yours truly was feeling impatient so just drained through a gap between pan and lid, leaving lots of water in and leading to quite runny mash.)

Pour mushroom mixture into oven dish, cover with mashed potatoes, sprinkle with paprika, bake for 20 minutes.

The picture in the book showed a nice diamond pattern of paprika lines over a bed of smoothly furrowed mash. We went more for the "random chaos" look. Tastes the same ...

Occasional recipes: poulet au Jean le Forgeron

This is a development of Sophie Grigson's beercan chicken, reported on last year. The problem with the original is it requires the chicken to be mounted vertically on top of a beercan, which basically takes up the entire oven. And it's quite time limited, while we needed a long slow roast to happen whilst at church. Our cunning resident Swedish chef hit on the notion of a pot roast instead. So, take:

• 1 chicken
• 1 can of beer

Stuff the chicken with an onion, cloves and sundry other spices as desired. Put in a casserole dish, pour over the beer, add a similar amount of water. We also rubbed on olive oil and paprika, which was a hangover from the original recipe. Put on lid, put in the oven at mark 3 and forget about it for the next three hours. At the end of this time the chicken will be cooked to perfection, with meat so tender it falls off the bone. Literally. I lifted it out of the pot and the legs stayed behind. Proof that beer makes you legless.

I name this dish in honour of the beer used. It would work equally well as Poulet de la Chateau Nouveau Brun, Poulet aux Directeurs or Poulet au Deux Syllabes, Semblable aux Relations Anormales.