The three minute breakfast

Thank you, Gordon Ramsay. What a brilliant idea. Poached egg, on mushrooms, on toast!

an egg
sliced baby portobello mushrooms, or any mushrooms
a slice of toast – in this case, rustic Italian from Amy’s on Bleecker Street

Put a small pan of water on to boil. Grab a frying pan, swish in a little olive oil and cook the mushrooms fast over a highish heat. Crack an egg into a small cup. Turn the boiling water down to a slow simmer, create a whirlpool, and gently tip the egg into it. Stick the bread in the toaster. In three minutes, the egg will be poached to perfection. Take it out of the water with a slotted spoon. Drain on kitchen paper. Pile the mushrooms on to the toast, and top with the poached egg. Scramble to take a photo of it before he eats it!

Bat sandwich

There are times when only bacon will do, whether it’s breakfast, lunch, or supper. Bacon with avocado is better still, as I learnt a few years ago in London. And bacon and avocado is further improved by fridge cold, juicy tomato slices. Bats, or bald mice, as they’re called in French, and which have nothing to do with this sandwich – are rather adorable. But dear, kind, ancient, TV-addicted Annie, who lived with my grandparents, maintained that bats got tangled in your hair and had to be cut free with scissors if you weren’t very careful, leaving you pretty bald as a result. I believed her until I realized it was nonsense. To this day, Dad is deeply scared of bats. Especially ones that fly into hotel rooms without warning.

A BAT, anytime, anywhere
Grill two rashers (slices) of really good bacon. The best you can get.
Cut an avocado in half. Slam the blade of a sharp knife into the stone, twist, pull out the stone, chuck it out. Patch up your hand with Band-Aid. Slice across the avocado without piercing the skin, then spoon out the slices on to a plate.
Slice a tomato.
Toast two pieces of bread.

Assemble. (Yes, of course it’ll fall out all over place. That’s OK, no one much is watching.) If you want to minimize the collapse, smush the avocado on to the toast before adding the bacon and tomato.

Rainy Sunday night

Never, ever rub your eyes after chopping a chili. I did. Bad move. And don’t wear a white T shirt anywhere near turmeric.

Rapid chicken curry with saffron basmati rice
thinly cut organic chicken breast, cut into dainty pieces
sliced onions (any colour)
one big and one little tin of diced tomatoes
a bag of washed spinach leaves (baby or grown up)
a chili, deseeded, unless you like your curry rocket strength
a smattering of cardamom pods
a teaspoon of cumin seed
a teaspoon of turmeric (plus the bit you dropped on your T shirt)
olive oil, salt and pepper
basmati rice
pinch of saffron

In a man sized frying pan, slowly fry the onions with the troublesome chili in a drizzle of oilve oil till translucent. Add the chicken and cook swiftly so that it turns white but isn’t cooked through. Add the spices, which you’ll previously have pounded in a pestle and mortar.

Tip in the tomatoes and reduce heat to its lowest temperature. Allow to simmer for 15 to 20 minutes. Throw in the spinach. It’ll wilt as only spinach can.

Cook the rice according to the instructions on the packet, adding a few strands of saffron.

Get hold of a cucumber and a cheese grater. Grate the cucumber into a bowl, add salt and pepper to taste, loosen with a driblet of olive oil. That’s raita, or close enough.

Serve in a vast serving dish with poppadoms and chutney. Sunday night curry – 30 minutes – quicker than ordering a takeaway.

Christmas Eve lunch for 12

That’s quite a lot of people, but still, we’ve had worse, like thirteen for Thanksgiving.
Roast pork, my way, crackling and all

Go to a proper butcher. Ask for a whole loin of pork, skin on, scored and chined. Rent a van. Bring it home.

Get out the trusty pestle and mortar. Bash up fennel seeds, rosemary, thyme, Maldon sea salt, pepper, olive oil, fresh fennel fronds if possible, maybe a clove or five, maybe garlic. Roll up your sleeves and prepare to get messy. Slather this all over the pork. Get it deep into the crevices created by the butcher’s knife. Stick in the fridge overnight.

Get the piglet out of the fridge for half an hour. Preheat the oven – I don’t know – say 350F or 190C. Put the pork in. Leave for 2 to 3 hours. Go out and buy replacement bulbs for the Christmas tree lights because they’re bound to have fused (make them white and non-flashing).

M&P, just before the pork came out

12 is too many to seat unless you live in a mansion, so make it easy. Skip the roast potatoes and hot vegetables, and make a salad for this instead. Buy crusty bread. Make some gravy. Hack up some apples, throw them in a pan with some water, and make apple sauce. What salad? Watercress. Endive. Leaves that will cut through the fattiness of the pork. Thinly sliced fennel. Lemon juice and olive oil.

The crackling will crackle unless you’ve got a hopeless butcher. There’s no other secret to it.

Cut along the chine to remove the bones. Carve. Go.

(And if you’re in Manhattan, you can’t get a loin of pork with the skin on unless you order it in advance from a proper butcher … try Florence Meat Market on Jones Street. Maria is a proper butcher.)

Mireia the beautiful

Mireia is one of my best and oldest friends. She lives in Barcelona with her two daughters, Lia and Lena, and her brilliantly clever husband, David – author of El Enigma Bestseller. I taught her English about a hundred years ago. Now she likes scones and clotted cream and says ‘moreover’ a lot. In return, she taught me how to make a real Spanish omelette. Fair swap. She brings a smile to everyone’s face. What more could you want?

Pa amb tomàquet
Not so much a recipe as a two second wonder.

baguette or similar, toasted or not, as you wish
a bagful of very ripe tomatoes cut in half
garlic (though optional)
olive oil
salt

Cut the bread lengthways down the middle. Toast it or don’t. Rub garlic over it or don’t. Smush the ripe tomatoes over the bread. Discard the red remains. Drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt. Goes perfectly with all things Catalan.

And no, I’m not posting the omelette secret. But here’s …

A good garlic bread
baguette
really good butter (it doesn’t come in ‘sticks’, that’s all I’m saying)
a large amount of garlic
lots of parsley
salt and pepper
foil
hot oven

Get the butter out of the fridge long before you make this. Get out the mortar and pestle, which you’ll have bought for about a dollar or a pound in a market in Malaysia, rather than 30 quid or $50 in some fancy kitchen shop. Smash up the butter and garlic. Add salt and pepper. Smear ridiculously generously over the bread. The back of a teaspoon is good for this. Sprinkle over a good amount of fresh parsley leaves (no stalks and don’t chop it because it messes up the flavour). Wrap tightly in foil. Shove it in the oven. Cut into wedges. Supply napkins.

A seafood extravaganza

I once came home from work to find two live lobsters crawling around my fridge. Not really all that surprising given that my brother was staying. He does that sort of thing just to wind me up. It started when I was ten and he was five and he’d just acquired a vile fluorescent green plastic bug with which he used to terrorize me. Anyway, worse than the fact the lobsters were alive was the fact they had names: Claud and Claudette. Or was it Clawed and Clawdette?

A New York clambake at home
The Lobster Place does a fantastic clambake and even includes the clambake pot. This is my version of the same thing.

live lobsters (or give yourself a break from the massacre and buy them dead and cooked) – you need one between two people
live mussels (not so traumatizing because they don’t have faces)
small live clams (neither do they)
fresh corn on the cob
little waxy potatoes
an onion
oodles of butter
garlic
lemon
seaweed if you can get it
water
and the largest pot you can lay your hands on

Opinion varies on how to kill a lobster. I don’t think I’m going to dwell on it here. However, I don’t think chucking them into boiling water is terribly humane. It’s certainly no fun to watch.

Put garlic, onions, water and seaweed into the pot and bring to the boil, then simmer. Add the potatoes first as they’ll take longer to cook than anything else, then the lobsters (assuming they’re not already cooked, they’ll need 15 minutes or so) followed by the corn, clams and mussels. Give the pot a good shake and check that all the mussels and clams have given up the will to live and are open. Throw out any that are shut.

Melt the butter.

Tip the whole lot out on to a vast serving dish and arrange so that it doesn’t look like one big mess. Squeeze the lemon over it. Gorge on seafood.

The Lobster Place, Bleecker Street

I love raclette

Should you ever find yourself in Chamonix, or anywhere in the Alps, demand raclette in every restaurant. Then come home and make it for your friends. My most successful evenings have been raclette-fuelled. Plus, you don’t cook – your friends do.

The tricky bit: you need a raclette machine. And if I were you, I’d buy two. There’s a big one for up to about 8 greedy guts, and a small one for 2 greedy guts (Pad and Rebecca, you know who you are!). Just type raclette into a well known search engine beginning with G. It looks like this, or at least mine does.

On the shopping list
raclette (this is a cheese, just in case), lots of it
bresaola (air-dried beef)
Parma ham (prosciutto, and I do wish restaurants would spell it correctly)
salami (I like finocchiona best of all – lots of fennel flavour)
any other dried/cured meat that takes your fancy, e.g. coppa, speck, fuet – just steer well clear of poultry
cornichons and tiny silverskin onions
little waxy potatoes, ideally La Ratte, but others work
No, you don’t need little batons of carrots and celery.

Cut the raclette into even slices about as long as a small thumb and about the thickness of a coin. Failing that, look at the size of the little raclette melting dishes that came with the machine you bought and work it out yourself. Just don’t make them too thick. Leave the rind on, but take any signs of a label off! Stick in the fridge until ready to serve. Otherwise the raclette sweats, and that’s no fun.

Put all the meats out on a wooden board, stick in the fridge until ready to serve. Otherwise they sweat, and that’s even less fun.

Tip the cornichons (my brother used to call them ‘cornichons en tire-bouchon’ – we never quite fathomed why) and onions into little serving bowls.

 

Cook the potatoes till just tender and leave them in the water to serve (you’ll need a slotted spoon to fish them out)

unless you have the real thing, which is a wooden potato dish that keeps them warm. Good luck with that on search engine beginning with G. I’ve had no luck.

Explain to your friends that they have to cook their own supper. Fire up the raclette machine. Take the potatoes off the stove and bring them to the table. Yank the refrigerated stuff out of the fridge, and get cooking. Melt a slice of cheese each till really bubbling, pour it over a couple of potatoes, and eat with the meats and cornichons.

Apremont or another white wine from Savoie is an excellent choice.

Very little washing up and supremely convivial. Add a leafy green salad if you’re craving the stupid carrot batons.

The thing about eggs

I once knew a brain surgeon. No, this isn’t the beginning of a shaggy dog story. I did once know a brain surgeon. And he subsisted almost entirely on fried egg sandwiches, which just goes to show cooking isn’t brain surgery. Or rocket science.

Toast two pieces of bread. Fry an egg on both sides. Yes, it absolutely does have to be organic. You know where they come from, even if you don’t know which came first. Place egg between slices of toast. Season. Go and save someone’s life. It worked for him. Brilliantly, actually.

There are also eggy muffins for breakfast:
Beat two eggs, add a dash of milk, season. Split an English muffin in half, dunk in the egg mixture, fry for a minute a side.

And of course there’s much to be gained when no one’s watching, in the form of egg and chips on a cold Friday night.

It’s in the Heather!

Crazy neighbour downstairs, as she is now known, took apart our hall cupboard and turned it into a pantry. It’s now called ‘the Heather’. That’s the least of what she did – we also have a new bedroom cupboard; an office that came out of nowhere; a dumb waiter that used to be a rubbish chute and is now home to Fantastic!, Shout! and bleach; and a new shower head. The rest I can’t tell you because she’s now fully booked as an interior desecrator (her pun, not mine!) all around the neighbourhood. She still pretends to be a teacher in her spare time. Hmm!

She comes to supper a lot, partly as a thank you for all her work, partly because she’s great. (And Phil, if you’re reading this, whatever it is you’re looking for now, it’s probably in The Heather.)

Used to house jackets and umbrellas. Now it's Maldon sea salt and Angostura bitters.

A Heather-like supper for three (lasagne)

Bolognese sauce
equal quantities (a pound) of minced pork and minced veal or beef
2 large tins of diced tomatoes
a big squirt of tomato puree or paste
a large glass of white wine
an onion, diced
salt, pepper, olive oil

Fry off the meat, then the onion and transfer to a saucepan. Add the tomatoes, tomato puree, wine, and season. Leave to bubble gently for up to two hours. Longer if you’re busy.

Bechamel sauce
Flour, butter, grated nutmeg, parsley stalks, bay leaf, a pint of milk.
Pour the milk into a saucepan, add the parsley stalks, bay leaf and season. Bring to a good simmer and let it infuse off the heat for at least 15 minutes.

Put a lump of butter into another saucepan, melt, then add about the same amount of flour to make a Roux. Mix together with a wooden spoon and allow the floury taste to cook out on the lowest heat possible for about ten minutes. Swap the wooden spoon for a whisk to avoid lumpy sauce disaster. Now gradually add the milk (from which you’ll have removed the stalks and leaf!) and whisk to make it glossy and lump-free.

Make your own lasagne sheets if feeling bold, or buy no-cook ones made by a reputable Italian brand.

Find an ovenproof serving dish of a suitable size and shape (since lasagne sheets are generally rectangular). Cover the bottom with a layer of bolognese, then the first sheet of pasta, then another layer of bolognese followed by a layer of bechamel, and so on until you’ve used everything up. If you’re feeling extravagant, also throw in some slivers of fresh mozzarella (not that disgusting ersatz stuff that comes in a square, dry block; the real one that comes in a milky water and is round or egg-shaped). Finish with a layer of bolognese, sprinkle over grated Parmesan, and put in a hot oven till bubbling and browned on top. 

A vegetarian comes to lunch – hurray!

I like having to cook an entirely vegetarian meal. It makes a change. Thanks, Michael, for coming to lunch.

Nigel Slater (Tender: Volume 1) has a brilliant recipe for a cold winter’s day: mushroom and spinach gratin. It goes more or less like this.

Choose some mushrooms you like the look of. Small brown ones are good, but you could pretty much use any you fancy. Buy spinach and wash it thoroughly if not already washed. Gritty spinach is foul. Then you also need a knob of butter, a glug of olive oil, the usual salt and pepper, and about half to three quarters of a pint of double (heavy) cream. And a large glass of white wine (one you would drink as well as cook with – I used Pinot Grigio last weekend).

 

In a large frying pan (assuming you’re cooking for five or six, or a small frying pan if you’re not), drizzle olive oil and add the knob of butter. Toss in the mushrooms, which you’ll have cut up into halves, or smaller if they’re big ones. Let them slurp up the buttery oil for a while until they get some colour. Splash in the wine and simmer for ten minutes or so while you dust the lampshades or something.

Tip spinach into a pan and wilt on high heat. I don’t add water but you can if you like – you’ll just have to squeeze it all out later. Drain in a colander until cool, then – whether you added water or not – squeeze out the inevitable brown water with your bare hands till it’s dry. Watery sauce is no good (see elsewhere on this blog).

Back with the mushroom brigade, add the cream and bring back to the boil. Season. I added some Cheddar I found in the fridge (sorry, Nigel).

Now tip the whole lot into an ovenproof serving dish and add the spinach. Make it even so the mushrooms and spinach aren’t segregated. Grate over some Parmesan cheese, stick it in a hot oven, wait till it bubbles and starts to go golden on top. Serve with baguette.