The partner and I have got a bit too porky in recent years, so over the past couple of months we have made a conscious effort to shed some of the lard. Naturally, we could not cut down on our fine wine intake, nor indeed our occasional consumption of characterful beer, cider and perry, so we have attempted to alter what we eat.

I have largely stopped eating lunch (apart from the odd banh mi from Viet Baguette here in Woowich when I absolutely must have a quality lunch; the opening of this sandwich shop has improved Woolwich quite markedly) which I have found to be staggeringly difficult. I do not wish to whine about this excessively, as taking this medication has improved my life no end, but the anti-psychotic I am on to deal with my paranoid schizophrenia (Olanzapine) has the side effect of making one mind-bendingly, toe-curlingly hungry all the bloody time. Someone other than me might say that the hunger induced by Olanzapine makes ‘the munchies’ feel quite insignificant and utterly tolerable, but I wouldn’t know about that. The first time I was on it, about seven years ago, I’d go out and buy two packets of sandwiches for lunch, horse them down and then think “Oh I’d like some cake now”.

Our main effort on the calorie-controlling front is eating more sensibly. The partner does not have his post-work, pre-dinner sandwiches any more and the dinners we eat are less focussed on high butter content (less mash, oh no!). Tonight’s (somewhat early) dinner was a perfect example: hot and sour beef salad. Here is the recipe and see right for a picture. It is a characterful, interesting and totally satisfying dish. The ultimately pleasing ‘almost raw’, top-quality fillet steak-action that we all enjoy is present, combined with the hot and sour flavours of chilli, Thai fish sauce (nam pla) and lime juice. It may be perilously low in calories, but by cripes is it fun to eat.

I’ve blogged about hating salad in the past (here are my suggestions for improving more mundane salads) but in this one the salad element is quite minimalist. I would not suggest adding more lettuce, even if you are perverse enough to like it, as it is the most carcinogenic food per unit serving there is (see the last link about mundane salads). When I’ve served this and other salads of a similar character to guests I usually warn them not to eat the green bits.

So is this somewhat lighter eating pattern successful? Indeed it is! Since the end of November when we started this I have lost a shade over a most satisfactory 7kg. This is pretty good going, I feel. The partner has lost even more and I am incredibly proud of him for doing so. But sod losing weight as an excuse; hot and sour beef salad is a great dish any time you feel like a simple but characterful and highly gratifying meal.

After returning from our largely disappointing jaunt to the provinces I wanted to cook something new, simple, yet tasty for dinner. A recipe in Richard Corrigan’s excellent The Clatter of Forks and Spoons (itself based on a recipe in Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking) seemed to fit the bill.

The verdict

The sauce was a revelation. The combination of the buttery texture and flavour with the earthy grassiness of the snails and the not inconsiderable garlic finish was very successful.

We think the sauce would work even better with sirloin steak (especially on the bone), or with a trimmed rack of lamb.

Our version last night was further improved as we couldn’t find a small tin of snails, so we used the drained snails from a jar of Godard’s Cassolette d’Escargots au Beurre Truffé. They imparted a subtle but highly pleasurable character to the sauce. The next time we make this sauce, we’ll definitely use fresh snails and shaved black truffle.

We got a 2kg boned shoulder of lamb from a reliable source and decided to cook something new with it. It was a total success. To make this staggeringly easy dish you will need:

2kg boned shoulder of lamb
400ml fresh chicken stock
150ml white wine
3 onions roughly chopped
2 sticks of celery chopped
2 carrots chopped
A couple of sprigs of rosemary
A couple of strips of lemon zest
A slug of olive oil
7 cloves of garlic peeled and crushed

Get your oven up to 160 Celsius. Into an oven-safe stew pot put the slug of oil then add the onions, garlic, celery and carrots then fry them over a medium heat until the onions begin to colour. Put the shoulder of lamb into the pot, add the stock, wine, lemon zest and rosemary. Then put a lid on it, stick it in the pre-heated oven for 2.5-3 hours, then carve it up and nosh with great delight. We served this with baked potato mash which was just lovely.

Isn’t that simple? It was a totally brilliant dish, especially satisfying as we just made the recipe up. Having a really good bit of lamb was undoubtedly the way forward. Mr T used to cook brilliant pot-roast lamb back in Oxford, a dish I had missed. This will be a regular dish on the menu.

Amazing chicken stock, originally uploaded by David Strange.

What remained after sandwiches and much picking at that 3.2kg chicken was used in to make some stock. Just stick all the bones, bits of skin and stuff that is left from your roast chicken into a big stew pot. Throw in some chopped carrots, onions, celery and if you are really keen some leeks. Shove in a couple of bay leaves and some thyme. Put a couple of big glasses of cooking-grade white wine in the pot then top up with water until all is covered. You then simmer the lot up for 3-4 hours before straining the liquor off the boiled up bits and saving it in the fridge or freezer.

This batch of stock was very satisfying when it came to using some for today's meal as it was so concentrated it had turned to jelly thanks to all the gelatine from the carcass.

Herb roast chicken, originally uploaded by David Strange.

We cooked a 3.2kg Sheepdrove Organic Farm chicken with the aid of some tarragon, chives and butter.

Firstly shove loads on butter under the skin, then cut up the herbs over the bird. Squeeze a lemon over the bird then shove the halves up its arse. A 30 minute sizzle at 220 Celsius followed by turning the heat down to 170 Celsius and roasting with regular basting for 50 minutes. Then rest for 30 minutes.

The flesh was moist and flavoursome, and there is plenty left for sandwiches. Hooray!

Chef and part-time sales director Mark Locke has suggested some improvements to my chicken in cider recipe. I approve of them all so I’m writing up version three of the recipe here. When you go to your butcher ask directly for “Four of your best chicken breasts and chicken thighs, please.” This is the mantra: if he asks any more questions just say “Whatever is best, please.” Bones in the thighs, we feel, they will add flavour.

To make enough for dinner for four people having a breast and a thigh each you will need:

A good breakfast (I suggest bacon, eggs, baked beans and black pudding with a bloody mary on the side)
4 chicken thighs
4 chicken breasts (skin removed)
500ml fresh chicken stock
750g unsmoked, dry-cure streaky bacon cut into 2-3cm strips
750g mushrooms roughly sliced
2 celery sticks cut into batons
1 carrot sliced
2 chopped shallots
3 medium onions finely chopped
700ml dry cider, this is perfect.
A few heaped dessertspoons of butter
A couple of dessertspoons of olive oil

Wake up in your own good time and have a leisurely breakfast. Remember those bloody marys must be strong enough to fire you up for fine food creation.

At a medium temperature fry up the onions in a bit of olive oil. They should be meltingly soft and just beginning to colour. Transfer the onions to your stew pot. Then add the butter to your frying pan and once it is melted add the chopped mushrooms. Stir them around so the butter is evenly absorbed and then cook at a medium temperature until they are properly cooked (but not burnt). The mushrooms should look wilted and in the bottom of the frying pan there should be a small amount of super-concentrated mushroom juice. Put the cooked mushrooms (with liquor) into the stew pot. The bacon strips need frying, until they are cooked but not crispy, before adding them to the stew pot. You then quickly cook the thighs on each side before adding them to the pot.

Pour in 200ml fresh chicken stock and then add the cider. You will need to heat this until it reaches simmering temperature (just below boiling, so the surface just quivers) then leave it at this temperature for an hour. Then turn the heat off, put the lid on and leave it. You are now free to pursue your day’s activities, I would suggest going to a gallery then meeting a chum for lunch and cocktails.

When you feel dinner is about half an hour away warm the stew pot up to simmering temperature again. In a small pan put the shallots, celery and carrots along with the remaining 300mls chicken stock. Bring to a gentle simmer then add the chicken breasts. Bring back to a simmer and gently poach the chicken breasts for 18-20 minutes.

Cook enough rice for four people then serve the chicken thigh stew and put one chicken breast on each plate. This is a stock-tastic version of the recipe which lovers of characterful chicken dishes will greatly enjoy.

Cheers, Mark.

This is basically the same recipe as the scallop salad I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Just replace the scallops with about 500g of the very best baby squid you can find. The partner and I had a little debate about how to prepare the squid, and we decided that a 30 second blanche in fiercely boiling water would be best. It was best. The salad will end up looking like this:

You may think there are one hell of a lot of chillies on that; you’d be right. The key with these Thai-style salads is certainly to make them hot, but you must remember it is not a competition. Daniel did you read that? Not a competition, ok?

I’ve got my finger on the pulse with this dish, alright. It’d be best to make it with beans you’ve soaked and cooked yourself, but this speedy version uses tinned beans. If you get good tinned beans the difference is not so great. To make enough for two good-sized portions you will need:

2 x 400g tins red kidney beans in water (drained)
2 medium onions finely chopped
7 cloves of garlic finely chopped
250g dried chorizo sausage sliced
300ml fresh chicken stock
50ml decent* Sherry (I’d use Palo Cortado)
Some olive oil
1.5 teaspoons of dried chilli flakes
A few chopped mint leaves

Fry the onions and garlic in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil at a medium temperature until they begin to colour. Then add the chorizo and fry for a bit longer until the red oil from the sausage colours the onion and garlic. Add the stock, Sherry, chilli flakes and the drained beans to the frying pan. Bring back to a gentle simmer then stir in the mint. It should look a bit sloppy and soupy. Transfer to a shallow oven-proof dish, drizzle some more olive oil on top and bake at 140 Celsius for an hour or until most of the fluid is either evaporated or absorbed by the beans.

This is a sausagey, beany, garlicky treat of complete pleasure. The kind of thing you can use to generate gas central heating on a cold winter’s night. We are wondering as to whether adding some squid to the recipe might be a fun thing.

*I say decent Sherry but that really applies to all the ingredients I give in these recipes. If you cannot be bothered to use quality ingredients you deserve everything you get, which is to say vermin-grade food. As we know, if it is possible to live it is possible to live well.

Sorry for the truly terrible joke. If you know what Nduja is you have knowledge I did not possess until a few days ago. This is it:

It is a spreadable salami from a small village named Spilinga in Calabria. Made from pig’s cheeks, lard and belly, with 25-30% local chilli, stuffed into pig’s intestines, smoked then finally cured for two months. If you spread a bit on toast you’ll enjoy its sweet, smoky, rich warmth from the chillies and mouth-coating fatty loveliness from the pig bits.

So tonight we use Nduja in pasta.

Cook as much pasta as you need for the number of people eating, 150g each of good quality dry stuff will normally do. When you cook pasta you need to add a truly incredible amount of salt to the water. The ratio is 100:10:1 so (for example) two people will require 3 litres water, 300g pasta and 30g salt.

Also, unless you are cooking gnocchi, which are really easy to tell when they are cooked (they float to the surface), you will need to taste the pasta to check when it is cooked. It may seem odd but you have to take instructions on packets as merely a rough guide, it can vary so much.

Once the pasta is cooked drain it immediately. If you fancy (and we often fancy) you can save a little of this salty pasta water to add to the final preparation. Put the pasta back in the cooking pot with a good slug of bloody good olive oil and about 50ml of the salty cooking water you saved and toss them together over a low heat.

Take 50g of Nduja per person, cut it into 2cm lumps. Add this to the pot of pasta and generally stir until it is all mixed together. Whilst it is over the heat you should add some grated sun-dried ricotta (or parmesan). Get noshing!

If you are fortunate enough to live in London you can buy Nduja at De Calabria in Borough Market. De Calabria’s website is here.

These Thai salads can be so delicious, the key often seems to make them mind-buggeringly hot. This one cries out for bird’s eye chillies and the very best scallops you can find. It is just so tasty! You will need:

400g scallops
The juice of 2 limes
A pinch of salt
2 tablespoons of fish sauce
6 bird’s eye chillies pounded
6 red shallots finely chopped
1 stalk of lemongrass finely chopped
4 kaffir lime leaves finely chopped
Plenty of mint and coriander leaves finely chopped

Clean the scallops, slice them in half cross-wise. Knead the lime juice and salt into the scallops and marinate for 3-4 minutes until the scallops go opaque. Add fish sauce and pounded chillies to make a sour, hot and salty dressing. Toss with the remainder of the ingredients and serve. It’ll look like this:

As far as light meals go this is pretty much as good as it gets: totally tasty, enlivening and exciting. We will cook this many times in the future.

Inspired by the Scotch eggs we had at the Hind’s Head in Bray recently, Daniel decided to try making some himself. Sillfield Farm sausages are so good he could not use anything else for the sausage meat coating. Squeezing that meat out of their sheaths is quite fun. You will need:

12 quail’s eggs
600g interesting sausage meat
125g of breadcrumbs
3 eggs
Flour
Pepper and salt (if using inadequately interesting sausage meat)

Put the quail’s eggs into boiling water and let boil for two minutes. Then plunge the eggs into ice-cold water to let them cool rapidly. Peel the quail’s eggs under water when cold.

Roll 50g of sausage meat into a ball. Flatten and wrap around a quail’s egg; try not to maul the eggs.

Roll the the Scotch egg in flour, dip in the beaten egg and finally roll in the breadcrumbs. Put the Scotch eggs in the fridge or freezer for 5 minutes, and then dip in egg and bread crumbs again. They will look like this:

Deep fry in vegetable oil at 170°C for three minutes or until dark golden brown, then put in a hot oven for a few minutes. Enjoy!

Steak tartare is what people who enjoy meat eat. You need terribly serious fillet for this. Best to get a tail piece (which will cost less money), but still no skimping on quality. So, get about 350g of steak per person, let it warm to room temperature and chop it up finely removing any fat you can see. It’ll look like this:

You also need to chop up some cornichons, shallots (banana shallots ideally), nonpareille capers and parsley. This time we also chopped up some pickled silverskin onions. Furthermore, you’ll need an egg yolk per person, some Dijon mustard, Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce. This stuff, basically:

Then mix the meat with the other ingredients, tasting as you go. If you serve it with pommes dauphinoises it’ll look like this when you’ve finished:

Finally, a top tip from David Strange:

This can provide you with an incredible method of making friends with a butcher. If you cannot be bothered to chop up your own steak you can ask a butcher to put it through their mincer. They may look a bit surprised, but assure them it is for steak tartare and you know what you are doing. When they come to show you the minced fillet steak, grab a pinch and eat it right there and then. You’ll have gained a friend for life and, we hope, a decent discount on your future purchases.

This worked a treat with the added flavour-enhancing ingredients, so I’m posting the recipe. It is a dead-easy dish to knock up. To make it you will need:

1.5Kg unsmoked streaky bacon in one piece complete with rind
A bottle of passable white wine
750ml fresh chicken stock
500g Puy lentils
15 shallots peeled but left whole
10 sticks of celery cut into batons 
3 carrots peeled and cut into batons
2 dessertspoons of butter
A couple of bay leaves
A couple of springs of thyme

For the mustard sauce:
150ml double cream
A heaped dessertspoon of Dijon mustard

Cut the rind off the bacon and put it in your stew pot. You cook this with the rind because it adds flavour, you don’t eat it. Put the lump of bacon in, add the chicken stock and white wine then heat it up. Once it begins to simmer turn the heat down to the lowest setting where the surface just quivers. Simmer it for half an hour at this temperature.

Once this half hour is up add the lentils, shallots, celery, carrots, bay leaves and thyme, bring back to the boil then simmer at the lowest heat for another hour.

Then take the bacon out of the pot and slice it into thick slices. Stir the butter into the lentils and vegetables to add richness. Serve wonderful, rich and tasty slices pork with the delicious lentil and vegetable stew. The mustard sauce just needs the two ingredients mixing and people can help themselves to this.

I’m cooking up some pork with lentils for a dinner party on Saturday. The recipe calls for boiling them in water, but we can do better than that. I’m going to try using a mixture of fresh chicken stock and white wine. I don’t see why it should be worse with more flavour-giving components. If it works I’ll post the recipe. If it doesn’t work I’ll say why not.

Yesterday I made a much-improved version of my chicken in cider recipe. Regular followers of whatinterests.davidstrange.net will have seen some blurry pictures of it cooking and on my plate.

So the first improvements come in the ingredients. You need double the amount of mushrooms and bacon (ie. 500g of each). When I said ‘characterful mushrooms’ I really meant it, OK? Closed-cup boring shite mushrooms are not good enough, we want flavour! The cider has to be dry but also of a serious, flavoursome nature. Quality ingredients lead to quality food.

The next part is the really cunning bit: leaving it to rest. After your leisurely breakfast it’ll be time to start cooking this so it will be ready for a seven o’clock dinner. Follow the instructions I gave in the recipe until you reach the simmering part, you’ll only want to simmer it for an hour before turning the heat off entirely. Stick a lid on the stew pot and leave it to cool down whilst you go and have lunch. Then at quarter past six in the evening bring it gently back to the boil before turning the heat to the lowest setting (so the surface of the stew just quivers) until you serve it at seven o’clock.

This period of cooling and resting intensifies the flavours and makes them more complex. If I make an even more baroque version of this I’ll make it the night before we eat it so it can rest for longer. I’ll also stick a pig’s trotter (with the skin scored with a knife) in it for the initial simmering and resting. Some bits of chicken carcass would also add to it during this stage of the cooking, I feel.

Certainly, this is a good thing to make and a better thing to eat. Just don’t forget you need quality ingredients. If you cannot manage that I suppose you don’t get that much out of this site.

This is how pros make top mashed potato, and I am a freaking pro, alright.

So, get 2 big Maris Piper potatoes per person and prick them all over with a fork. Bake them at 180 Celsius for 90 minutes. Then slice them open, scoop out the middle into a pan, put the pan over the lowest heat you can manage and get mashing; this won’t take long. Add about about 25g of unsalted butter per person and mash like crazy. Add a splash of double cream and mash it in, then serve them. Tell your diners they’ll need to add pepper to taste. Delicious.

My mash with boiled potatoes is nigh unbeatable. To be specific, it can only be beaten by this mash.

Roasting beef is really easy. You need instructions? Ok, here goes:

Turn your oven up to 220 Celsius and roast the beef for 30 minutes. Then turn the oven down to 160 Celsius and open the door until the temperature goes down that low. Then roast for another 9 minutes per 500g of meat. If you have a digital temperature probe you’ll want to stop roasting when the middle of the beef hits 50 Celsius; this will be rare which is how we want beef. Easy, eh?

Last night we celebrated the Jeff’s birthday with a roast rib of beef.

And I did get the bugger properly rare:

We ate it with leeks and triple-cooked chips:

We got the beef from the Ginger Pig, probably the best beef butchers in Town.

Many thanks to Dan for the camera work.

This recipe is so not mine I’d hate hate to actually repeat it here. I can post a link, though, to Heston Blumenthal’s brilliant spaghetti carbonara recipe (with handy tips on cooking pasta). He uses a chilli in it, amazing!

Daniel cooked this fabulously well tonight. It was terribly enjoyable. You may be thinking I need a picture at this point, but we’ve lost the battery charger for the camera and our phone cameras are rubbish. It is top stuff, and not too difficult to prepare.

Right, this is serious cooking with the truffle. Buy the best chicken you can find, weighing about 2kg. Make sure it is up to room temperature before you start preparing and cooking it.

Make some slits in the skin and slip in some lumps of unsalted butter. Then cut your truffle in half and shove half under each side of the skin. It’ll look something like this:

Heat your oven up to 230 Celsius and cook the chicken for 15 minutes. Then turn the heat down to 190 Celsius and cook for 45 minutes, basting every fifteen minutes. Finally, turn the oven off and half open the door and leave the chicken inside to rest for 30 minutes. It’ll then look like this:

Now doesn’t that look quite, quite wonderful? You can carve it and serve with whatever you fancy; Daniel prepared some German potato salad. If you like, and we do like, you can slice up the truffles and put them on the chicken. Our platefuls looked like this:

You want to drink some serious white Burgundy with such a decadent meal.

Many thanks to Mark Locke for the truffle. We really enjoyed it.

Daniel was given a truffle on the condition we write up what we cooked with it. Seemed a good deal to me. The first thing we made was a truffle omelette.

Step one is to put some top-quality eggs (Burford Browns are delicious) in an airtight jar with the truffle for four days; this infuses the eggs with a truffle flavour. Two eggs per person will do just fine.

You then make an omelette with the eggs. Do you need me to tell you how to make an omelette? It cannot hurt, I suppose.

The first thing is to separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs. You then beat the whites until they are stiff and bubbly. This is so you have a light, fluffy omelette; if you beat them together it will not have the correct texture.

Then quickly whisk in the yolks and cook over a medium heat. If you want to be really decadent you can mix in a few truffle shavings at this point, but it is not strictly necessary as the eggs will have taken on enough of the flavour. That is all it takes. You will then have a lovely omelette infused with wonderful truffle flavours. Daniel chose to eat his with toast.

One meal we cook quite regularly is a simple affair, but it is one of those really pleasing things with are just a total hoot to eat: grilled prawns with aioli.

You will obviously need a good source of raw prawns; we get ours from Borough Market. Don’t get super-massive ones as they don’t taste as good, about 7-8cm long is just fine. 800g-1kg of prawns will do for two hungry people as a main meal.

It just takes a few minutes to grill each side of the prawns (as in, turn them over when one side is cooked) under a hot grill. Don’t overcook them, you want them to be moist and flavoursome. They are done when they turn completely pink and a very few of them start have hints of black bits of char on them. Once they are cooked pour into a big bowl and start peeling (when they’ve cooled down a bit).

Serve with some good bread and loads of super-tasty aioli, the recipe for which is here. Dipping just cooked prawns in garlicy aioli makes the experience most enjoyable. You’ll want to have extra aioli on bread, because it tastes great. It is a simple meal, but often they are the best.

Tonight we held a modest little dinner party for my mother and stepfather. For a change, it wasn't terribly wine-tastic, as the food was of the unsophisticated kind. It was terribly good, though. We cooked Boston baked beans:

And wonderful Sicilian sausages from Sillfield farm:

You can tell those are good sausages because they go pink when you cook them: meaty goodness!

It was not the most refined of dining experiences, but the food slipped down a treat. I have to say it is also nice not to be feeling violently ill, as I have for the past ten days or so.

I'm roasting a chicken, one of the excellent organic Sheepdrove Farm chicken that Waitrose sell. I am using a slight variation on my fool-proof recipe I posted back in June. The only difference is that I made a couple of cuts in the skin and shoved some un-salted butter, tarragon and chives under the skin and against the flesh. The idea being that the butter will make the chicken even more moist and the herbs will transfer more flavour. This "under the skin"-technique is what you do with truffles if you are fortunate enough to have some and want a lovely, truffled chicken.

There are a myriad of cookery books all competing for our attention. I cannot claim I've read all of them, but I have experienced a few which any serious cook will find very useful.

As far as general recipe books go, ones that cover a variety of foods, there are three I can whole-heartedly recommend. Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson is a wonderful little book that has easy recipes and tells interesting stories associated with the ingredients.

Simon Hopkinson is a great chef and an entertaining author, perfectly willing to dabble in more baroque food as presented in the second book I would recommend: The Prawn Cocktail Years. This book is a real hoot, with all kinds of food that are no longer fashionable such as coq au vin, marquise au chocolat and other dishes time has passed by.

The final general recipe book I feel is worth shelling out for is How to Eat: Pleasures and Principles of Good Food by Nigella Lawson. This is a big book packed with easy to follow recipes, with sections including low-fat food and cooking for children. There is plenty of interest in this book.

There are two books I would suggest for dealing with specific ingredients. If you fancy some fishy action then Rick Stein's Seafood is a very useful book. It has plenty of information on how to prepare different types of seafood as well as lots of good recipes.

Of course, meat is what we are all really interested in cooking, and you'll do it justice if you follow the guidance in The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This is probably my favourite cookery book; meat is generally the way forward. Hugh has useful things like roasting time and temperature tables, and even some recipes in which meat is not the main ingredient, such as the utterly delicious Boston baked-beans. This book is the monk's manhood.

Finally, a book I've mentioned a couple of times recently is the key to successful Thai cooking - Thai Food by David Thompson. You cannot go wrong with this book. The recipes are clearly presented and quite delicious. It also gives plenty of information on the history and culture associated with the food. A real gem.

I do own other cookery books, but these six are those I would least like to do without. If you buy these you'll always be able to cook up a storm and impress your dining companions.

We were in Oxford at the weekend and my step-father cooked a coq au vin; It rivaled even La Ferme de la Ruchotte's effort. So I stole the recipe. You will need:

The very best chicken you can find that weighs about 1kg, get your butcher to joint it into twelve pieces
500ml red wine
1tablespoon olive oil
150g thick-cut bacon, cubed
15 small shallots, peeled
200g button mushrooms
1 clove of garlic, peeled and crushed
300ml chicken stock
2 bay leaves
2 sprigs of thyme
Sea salt
Freshly ground pepper

Trim the chicken pieces of excess fat. For a really rich flavour, marinate the chicken pieces in the wine over-night. The next day pour off the marinade (keep it to cook with) and dry the chicken well with Kitchen paper to make frying easier.

Heat the oven to 180°C. Put the olive oil and bacon in a large ovenproof casserole dish and cook over a medium heat for three minutes. Add the whole shallots and cook for a further six minutes until browned, then add the mushrooms and garlic and cook for another two minutes, stirring well. Remove the ingredients from the pan and keep them. Place the chicken in the casserole and cook until golden and sealed all over - do this in batches to get a good, even colour, Set the browned chicken to one side.

Reduce the heat. Slowly add the red wine (or marinade) and the chicken stock and bring to boil. Return the chicken, vegetables, and bacon to the casserole, along with the bay leaves, thyme and seasoning. Cover and cook in the oven for 35 minutes.

Whilst my step-father's coq is good as soon as it is ready, it really improves if you cover it up and come back to it the next day. Just warm it through and the flavours will be even more intense.

My dear mother used to make chicken in cider when I was but a fresh, young thing; I have many memories of enjoying this when growing up. It is easy to cook and provides a lot of pleasure. You will need:

4 top-quality chicken thighs
250g un-smoked streaky bacon cut into 2cm long pieces
250g characterful mushrooms chopped into slices
2 large onions finely chopped
1 litre good, dry cider
1 tablespoon Marigold vegetable stock powder
A couple of tablespoons of butter

Fry the mushrooms in half the butter until they are soft, transfer them to a stew pot. Fry the onions in the remaining butter until they just start to colour, then transfer them to the stew pot. Fry the bacon bits until they are cooked, add to the other cooked ingredients in the pot. Quickly fry the chicken thighs so the outside is just cooked, transfer to the stew pot. Add the vegetable stock powder then the cider. Bring the stew gently to simmering temperature, then leave it to simmer over the lowest heat that has the surface quivering, you don't want it boiling too fiercely or the meat will dry out and go stringy. Let it simmer for a couple of hours then serve with rice. My mother used to thicken the cider sauce with corn flour, which you are more than welcome to try, but I don't think it adds anything to the experience.

It is so easy and so tasty. You will need the following:

1.8kg chicken, the very best you can find. Organic, free-range chickens taste the best.
125g of unsalted butter
1 lemon
Fresh chives
Fresh tarragon

Make sure the chicken is at room temperature before you start. Then, with a pair of scissors, chop half the tarragon and half the chives so they sit on top of the chicken. Put the other half of the tarragon and chives inside the chicken's cavity. Squeeze the lemon over the chicken then put the squeezed lemon halves inside the cavity. Then apply slices of the butter to the outside of the chicken, saving a slice to put in the cavity.

Roasting is the easy part. Get your oven up to 220°C and sizzle the chicken for fifteen minutes. After this turn the oven down to 190°C and spoon some of the lovely, buttery chicken juices over the chicken. Put it back in the oven for 17 minutes, then take it out again for more basting with the juices. Then back in the oven for another 10 minutes before basting again. Put the chicken back in the oven for 7 minutes.

After this time has elapsed take the chicken out of the oven. Cover it and the tray it was roasted in tin foil then put a tea towel over that. Give it 20 minutes to rest then carve and you should a have a lovely, flavoursome chicken.

Tonight we made goong cha nam pla again. However, this time we used the biggest king prawns we could find at Borough Market. Turns out this was not optimal, the smaller prawns we used last time tasted sweeter and had a more mouth-coating richness to them. We also used normal red chillies rather than bird's eye chillies and this was clearly a mistake. The fiery heat is an important part of the experience and with that diminished using weaker chillies the dish was not quite so exciting.

Friday's lovely meal at Addie's Thai Café gave us a recipe to steal: goong cha nam pla or raw prawn salad. For this you will need:

24 large raw prawns
A bulb of fresh garlic finely chopped
8 bird's eye chillies de-seeded and finely chopped
A bunch of coriander chopped
The juice of three limes
Two teaspoons of nam pla (Thai fish sauce)

Shell and butterfly the prawns. Whilst you are doing this mix all the other ingredients together and allow them to infuse. Arrange the prawns artfully on a plate and spoon the 'salad' onto them. It'll look like this:

Obviously, you'll need fresh, high quality prawns, but when would you buy anything else? I suppose it would be fair to point out that this dish is extremely hot.

The starter I cooked last night was incredibly easy and totally delicious. It helps that it is asparagus season here in England; English asparagus is, of course, the best in the world.

All you need is some fresh asparagus, some excellent olive oil and some top-quality Parmesan. All you do is cook the asparagus for as long as you like (I suggest boiling in a large pan of salted water for five minutes) then put it on a warmed plate. Drizzle some olive oil on top (you cannot go wrong with Ravida, it is my favourite olive oil) and sprinkle some Parmesan shavings on top. Don't skimp on either the Parmesan or the oil.

Simple and tasty fare that is, like all other food, made by the quality of the ingredients.

Dinner tonight will be Spaghetti Bolognese, something I haven't cooked in a remarkably long time. The ingredients are:

500g ground beef
250g dry-cure streaky bacon cut up into 2cm long pieces
300ml passata
250ml fresh beef stock
200ml Chianti or similar red wine
A large carrot, grated
A large onion, finely chopped
Two sticks celery, chopped into thin slices
2 bay leaves

Fry the beef, then transfer to a large pot. Do the same with the bacon. Fry the chopped onion in a little oil until it just softens then transfer it to the large pot. Same goes for the carrot and celery (do these at the same time). Add the bay leaves, stock, Chianti and passata to the large pot then bring to the boil. Turn the heat down and cook on a low temperature for 1.5-2 hours. By the time it is ready it should be a lot more reduced than when you first started. Check the seasoning then serve with the very best fresh spaghetti.

This is a slight variation on the traditional recipe, but my minor changes are only designed to add flavour. I have to say I am not sure where one can generally obtain the black beans of Tolosa, we got ours from the restaurant that serves the best bean stew in that town. For this you will need:

500g Tolosan black beans, alubia negra
600g unsmoked streaky bacon in one piece
500ml fresh beef stock
Some minor white wine, Anjou Blanc is good
A large onion
6 cloves of garlic
100ml olive oil

Soak the beans in water overnight. About five hours before you want to eat chop up the onion and fry it in a few millilitres of oil until it begins to soften. Place the fried onion in a large pan. Crush or chop up the garlic and fry until it just begins to change colour, this will not take long. Put the fried garlic in the pan. Drain the beans then add to the pan (discarding the water they were soaked in), along with the beef stock and the rest of the olive oil. Add some of the white wine until the beans are just covered. You then bring the stew to the boil, then reduce the temperature until it is only just simmering. This is very important, the temperature should be such that the surface of the stew just quivers. Stew with a lid on the pan for two hours at this temperature.

When this time has elapsed cut the piece of bacon into 2cm cubes and fry until the bacon fat just begins to run. You then add this to the stew and simmer for another three hours, again with the pan covered. The beans need to be cooked for five hours in total. It'll then be ready to eat.

Ideally, you should serve this with black pudding/blood sausage and pickled peppers. The pickled peppers are not terribly wine-friendly so skip them if you are going to drink something good, I know I am not serving any when I cook this at the weekend.

For the type version of this stew go to Restaurant Fronton in Tolosa, it is freaking delicious there.

David

We have a vegetarian coming around for dinner tonight. I am happy to say I have never had to cook for a vegetarian before, so when this challenge was announced to me I felt rather apprehensive. Quite obviously, most recipes would simply be ruined by 'removing the meat'. However, it did occur that one of our regular recipes could be easily adapted. Cambodian Hot and Sour Beef Salad can easily become Hot and Sour Prawn salad with a change in the source of protein. If we get large and suitably meaty prawns on our immanent trip to Borough Market this should work a treat. I do suspect the original recipe may well be the best, though.

David

Today we are having grilled baby squid with aioli for lunch. To make aioli you will need:

4 peeled cloves of garlic
Half a teaspoon of salt
A large egg yolk
The juice of half a lemon
150ml extra virgin olive oil

Crush the garlic cloves into a bowl, add the salt and mix into a paste. Add the egg yolk and lemon juice, then start mixing with an electric whisk. Slowly dribble in the olive oil whilst mixing so it is incorporated and finally forms a thick fluid of mayonnaise-like consistency.

This makes a quite delicious aioli that has real garlic heat. Lovely.

After my over-done goose and chicken I have finally realised I should have used one of my Christmas presents, a digital temperature probe. Tonight's meal is roast rib of beef and all I had to do was put it in the oven at the correct temperature (230°C for 25 minutes before turning it down to 160°C) until the alarm on the temperature probe went off. I like pretty rare beef so I set the probe to beep when the centre of the meat reached 50°C. It looks pretty good from the outside:

And on the inside (with pommes dauphinoises and green beans):

For pieces at the edge of the joint that looks just perfect to me. It was delicious.

Lunch today is lobster rolls. We had these twice in New York from the Pearl Oyster Bar and they were quite delicious. To make them you will need:

Two brioche rolls
A reasonable-sized cooked lobster
Mayonnaise
Goose fat or butter

Get all of the meat out of the lobster and chop it into not too small pieces. Mix this with some mayonnaise. Slice the brioche rolls in half and fry the inside in (ideally) goose fat or butter until golden. Fill the now-fried rolls with the lobster and mayonnaise mix. Eat with a lot of pleasure. These are very nice with extremely thin frites.

I had some fresh tortellini planned for lunch today. I didn't have any sauce, alas, so I wondered if I could perk them up a bit by grating cheese over them. Then it struck me that I could put the pasta with the cheese on it under the grill:

It was rather nice. You need a characterful cheese, ideally. I used some old cheddar. Don't skimp on the amount of cheese used.

I warn you that if you put a plate or bowl under the grill it will get mind-bendingly hot.

Today is my birthday and I am having some friends over to help ease the pain of becoming even more knackered and crapulent. I don't want to spend the evening tied to the cooker so I have made something where all the preparation can be done in advance: a daube. This is beef and bacon stewed up in white wine and beef stock with a few vegetables added for extra flavour. I started cooking it this morning, as stews are often better if they are cooked a long time. All it needs now is to be warmed up when my guests arrive and served with some pasta. The recipe I used comes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's excellent River Cottage Meat book. I highly recommend this book as a great source of recipes and philosophy on cooking meat.

David.

Today I am cooking baked beans to have with some rather nice sausages from Sillfield Farm; the bacon in the recipe also comes from there and it is the best bacon I have ever eaten. To cook baked beans you will need:

500g dried flageolet beans soaked overnight in cold water
500g unsmoked streaky bacon in one piece
8-10 small onions or shallots
3 tablespoons black treacle
50g soft brown sugar
1 tablespoon English mustard
4 cloves.

Drain the beans then place then in an oven-proof casserole dish and add enough water to cover them by a couple of centimetres. Boil hard for ten minutes then simmer gently for an hour. Whilst they are simmering cut the bacon into lumps a few centimetres across. You can leave the rind on the pieces, or trim it off the bacon whilst it is still in a lump. If you trim off the rind make sure it is added when you put the bacon in the casserole. Peel the onions and stick a clove into four of them.

After the simmering time is over if the beans have become dry then add just enough hot water to cover them. Then add the bacon (plus rind if you cut it off), onions, sugar, mustard and treacle and stir well. Cover the casserole dish with a lid and place in the oven pre-heated to 140C. Cook for three hours.

After three hours remove the lid and stir, before placing the dish back in the oven with the lid off for another hour. This allows the bacon bits to brown and thickens the sauce. You can then serve the baked beans (with the piece of rind removed if you cut it off to start with). As I said, I'll be having these with sausages tonight, but they are quite nice by themselves or you can even spread them on toast. They'll keep in the fridge in a Tupperware container for a week.

You can always try something new. In the fridge we had Serrano ham and in the freezer hash browns. I wrapped the hash browns in the ham and deep-fried them.

The ham went very crispy and tasted a tiny bit burnt. If I am ever so bored and stuck with the same ingredients again I might do them for less time. This is not sub-interest as it is very funny.

A recipe that is great for a light summer meal: Hot and sour beef salad. Don't worry, there is not that much of the dangerous lettuce in it. You will need per person.

A thickish piece of fillet steak (roughly 200g)
Four lettuce leaves
One shallot finely chopped
One red chili finely chopped
Two dessert-spoonfuls of Thai fish sauce, Nam Pla
Two dessert-spoonfuls freshly squeezed lime juice
A teaspoonful of sugar

Fry the fillet steak for one and a half minutes a side at the hottest temperature you can get a pan up to. Whilst frying that arrange the four lettuce leaves on a plate. Mix the fish sauce, lime juice and sugar in a small vessel. When the steak is fried it should be incredibly rare. Slice the steak into thin strips and arrange these on top of the lettuce; there should be the thinnest of crusts on each side of the steak slices, with a big rare stripe down the middle. Sprinkle the chopped shallots and chilies over the top and pour over the fish sauce/lime juice mix.

It should all look like this:

If you get really fiery chilies it is alright to scrape some of them off the meat to leave them, but really this is a dish to make you sweat and feel good over the summer. It is light, themed on meat and very invigorating; what more could you ask for?

David

Every one needs to know how to make: mashed potato.

For this you need:
800g peeled King Edward potatoes
250g good-quality unsalted butter
150ml double cream
Fresh ground pepper to taste.

Chop up the potatoes into small-ish pieces and boil vigorously for twenty minutes in a large pan filled with well salted water. Drain the potatoes and place back in the empty pan over the lowest heat possible. Mash the potatoes until reasonably broken-up. Add the butter in five stages, mashing vigorously between each addition of butter so that the butter is completely incorporated before adding the next batch. By the time all of the butter has been added the potatoes should be mashed enough to be lump-free. Pour in the cream and mash/stir this in with the masher. It will initially go a bit thin, but if you mash and stir for a minute or two it will thicken up again to result in a very pleasing mashed-potato consistency. Grind in black pepper to taste and serve.

Mashed potato is an essential ingredient in such sophisticated nursery-dishes as smoked eel with bacon and mash.

Look at that bacon! 'Iron age' bacon from Silfield farm. Shame they so rarely have it these days.

I have a dinner party organised for tonight and as I am feeling quite rotten it will be a simple meal; chicken in cider. For four people you will need:

4 chicken breasts
4 chicken thighs
1kg decent mushrooms sliced
3 large onions
750g streaky bacon cut into 2cm lengths
Fresh chicken stock
2 dessert spoons vegetable stock powder
Plenty of decent dry cider
Butter

Chop and fry the onions in a bit of butter until soft, transfer them to a stew pot. Fry the sliced mushrooms in plenty of butter until just cooked then add them into the stew pot. Fry the bacon until cooked but not crispy, put it in the stew pot. Fry the chicken pieces quickly until the outside is cooked, then put them in with the other ingredients. To the stew pot add the chicken and vegetable stocks then add the cider until all of the ingredients are covered by it; this will require roughly a litre of cider. Get the stew up to a simmering temperature then simmer on the lowest possible heat for two-three hours. Low temperature simmering is the key to slow cooking. The surface of the stew should just be quivering with heat, not boiling.

This is normally served with rice.

David.

Yesterday I roasted a rib of beef. It was an excellent piece of meat that came from the Wild Beef Company who visit Borough Market here in London. Their cows are allowed to roam free on Dartmoor so they gain extra flavour. The meat is then dry aged until properly mature and ready to eat. They are suppliers of the best beef I've had.

It was a 1.8kg rib so I roasted it for a total of 55 minutes; 20 minutes at 220°C then 35 at 160°C. This made sure the beef was nice and rare.

It is very important to allow your meat to rest at room temperature for half an hour after roasting. This ensures all of the juices are evenly distributed in the meat and it is nice and moist. This was a great piece of meat and I look forward to having some of what remains in sandwiches today.

David.

I really hate salad, they are generally incredibly depressing. Worst of all are those salads one finds in minor English restaurants and pubs: limp iceberg lettuce, half a tomato and a few slices of cucumber all served at fridge temperature with hardly any dressing. Dreadful stuff. Yet, over the past year I have served many salads that have been edible largely thanks to the power of decent salad dressing. My recipe for decent dressing is:

One part balsamic vinegar
Four parts good extra-virgin olive oil
Dijon or English mustard to taste

These can be beaten together with an electric whisk. This combination often goes quite thick when whisked together. Due to the hideous nature of general salad ingredients you need quite a lot of dressing to make them palatable. As I've suggested, bacon bits are a useful improver. Cheese is frequently useful too; I like thin slices of Parmesan.

I should point out that salad is actually incredibly unhealthy. When I was an epidemiologist I attended a lecture that included a mention of carcinogenic (cancer-causing) foods. Apparently, per unit serving lettuce is the most carcinogenic food there is. Cucumber is third most carcinogenic. When I tell people the risks of eating salad they immediately say it is due to the chemicals on supermarket vegetables. Not so, it is due to the Caffeic acid naturally present in lettuce and cucumber. Lettuce is really very carcinogenic and I really should continue to avoid eating it regularly. If you'd like to read more about naturally-occuring carcinogens then this holiday menu has some more information.

David.