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.

Since my first review of Comptoir Gascon I’ve been twice more: it was chortle-rific both times.

From the standard menu I can heartily recommend the duck rillettes as a starter, it is very well priced for such a meaty, fatty treat. We like meaty, fatty treats*. The grillled squid with barley-sotto was another real hit; that squid action really warps my mind with pleasure.

The two daily specials we tried both hit the pleasure-spot. If you see duck gizzard salad (oh I drool even to think of it) or braised ox cheek (yes, much drooling) on their blackboard you can order them without fear.

Since I have been dining with employed types it is good that you can have a decent meal, well-priced and be in and out of there in less than an hour.

*By ‘we’ I mean all people with a healthy attitude to food.

Dining in Farringdon generally means meat. Comptoir Gascon, the bistro associated with London’s best foie gras joint Club Gascon, will serve up enough duck and pork to fill even the hungriest of the lunch crowd. Dan and I left replete and happy.

The menu was short but had plenty of offerings that piqued my interest. They have fish and vegetable dishes as well as the preferred options which were more pork and duck themed. Some of the fish dishes almost reeled me in, but obviously anyone eating vegetarian food in a Gascon-themed establishment will probably get weird looks. Honestly, don’t mistreat your body like that, have some meat.

I couldn’t resist the piggy treats as a starter, which turned out to be a selection of bits of cured pork and sausage with a piece of fried black pudding. The meats were all quite good but the black pudding was bloody fantastic; I could feel it improving my day as I ate it.

We all have dishes we cannot help but order when we see them on a menu, ris de veau for me, foie gras for Dan. He was a bit miffed that it was a couple of slices of terrine rather than fresh pan-fried, but he said they were easily up to standard. His plate was clean even faster than mine.

If foie gras is one thing you eat in Gascony then surely cassoulet is the other. So I ordered it. It was rich and beany, with a couple of good-sized pieces of delicious sausage and a piece of confit of duck. I may have had better cassoulet (at Au Trou Gascon in Paris), but I rather enjoyed this one. The portion size was suitable for a healthy eater like me, I just left a couple of beans.

Dan had some crackling pork belly with a couple of carroty things. He was very pleased with the skill in getting good crackling with meltingly soft pork belly. This looked so good I am sorely tempted to go for it next time I am there. The pureed carrots were obviously some kind of joke, who’d want to eat that? The other carrot offering looked better, but hey, vegetables: do we care?

When our bill came the most expensive item on it were our four beers, which seemed odd but it was good the meal was so generally affordable. All those lovely bits of meat! It is a relaxed dining atmosphere and you’ll be in and out in an hour. If you are a Farringdon type I’ll see you there one lunchtime.

Contact details: Comptoir Gascon, 63 Charterhouse Street, London EC1M 6HJ Tel: 020 7608 0851

Many thanks to Dan for a great lunch. Naturally the company was the best thing about it!

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.

Lunch cannot always be a three-hour booze-fuelled frenzy of food, alas. However, just because you have to be quick does not mean you should skimp on quality. For a speedy lunch the Mexican street food at Wahaca will hit the spot perfectly.

We visited the Chandos Place branch which is a busy, bustling cellar. Even though it was pretty full it was not too loud, which was pleasing. The place mats are menus and we liked the idea of the street food selections, the idea being that you chose 2-3 small plates each and share them with your dining companions.

We had five dishes plus some nachos with salsa for general grazing. They were all cooked with skill and arrived quickly. The dish we strongly suggest you get is the pork pibil taco, the pork was properly flavoursome and delicious. One thing that surprised me is that even the dishes marked as being spicy were not that chilli-powered; everything was pleasingly relaxed in that regard.

Our meal came to £30 including a couple of beers, we felt full and that we had done well. In and out in 40 minutes, too, great for the employed-types.

Locations, menu and all that kind of stuff are on their website.

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.