Wild Rabbit Stew With IPA

There's an old joke along the lines of a man goes into a restaurant and asks, "Is the rabbit wild?" "Of course it's wild," says the waiter, "it's absolutely livid."  That's got nothing to do with anything, but just to say use wild rabbit for this recipe. It's got a far better flavour than farmed rabbit, it keeps poachers in work, and most farmed rabbits live terrible lives.

I had wild rabbit on a recent trip to Georgia (the country not the state) and I'd almost forgotten how good it is. There it was cooked in white wine and served in a clay dish surrounded by mashed potato. It tasted good, but the meat was still very firm and could have done with being cooked at least an hour longer.

It can be quite a fiddly meat so you want it falling off the bone - and that takes two hours or so of slow cooking. This recipe will do the trick. It is good cooked in red or white wine, but I find it's much better when braised in a (forgive me) hoppy beer like Indian pale ale.

One wild rabbit, jointed
Five tablespoons of sunflower oil
Four tablespoons of flour
Three medium onions, sliced
Three sticks of celery, peeled and diced
Three medium carrots, peeled and diced
Eight garlic cloves, crushed
Two bay leaves
Ten peppercorns
Four green cardamom pods
One pint of IPA 
One pint of water, more if needed
One teaspoon tomato puree
Eight medium potatoes, peeled and halved
Salt to taste

Rabbit is generally cut into eight pieces and it is very easy to do. Take the legs off, and cut the body into four pieces. Make sure you put in the kidneys etc. as well, as they improve the flavour of the liquor. The secret is not to hack away at it with a knife, otherwise you'll end up with sharp bone shards in the stew. Instead hit the back of your knife with a rolling pin and this will give a clean cut through the joints. Easier still, get the butcher to do it.

Sprinkle the pieces with salt then dredge in flour so they are evenly coated. Heat the oil in a pot until it is quite hot, then add the rabbit. Cook on each side for three minutes or so until well browned. Add the onion, celery and carrot and stir well. Fry for another two minutes, then add the bay leaves, tomato puree, cardamom, garlic and peppercorns.

Add the beer, making sure you scrape off all the fried flour bits that may have stuck to the bottom of the pan. Then add enough water to just cover the rabbit. Bring to the boil, then reduce to a low heat. Cover the pan and simmer on the stove for two hours. Stir occasionally and cook at times with the lid off if the liquid needs reducing. Add more water if it is getting too dry. Add the potatoes 30 minutes before the end. It's ready when the meat can be pulled off the bone and the potatoes are still holding their shape, but cooked through. Season to taste.

Spaghetti Sofia

This was inspired by a pasta dish I had during a visit to Bulgaria's capital Sofia. It's a wonderfully laid-back place if you haven't been there, and I thoroughly recommend a visit. It's also worth noting the beer is ridiculously cheap too. One of the increasingly decreasing countries in Europe that is still affordable after the pound was floored by Brexit.

Spaghetti, enough for two people
2 shallots or one small onion
2 garlic cloves
Good knob of butter
Salt, pepper
30g fresh basil, chopped
20 baby plum tomatoes
Good handful of grated cheese
Splash or two of fish sauce

Cook the spaghetti in salted water then drain.
Melt the butter in a pan. Add the chopped onion and garlic. Add the tomatoes. Fry for two minutes until the onion is soft and the tomatoes begin to split.
Add the pasta, basil and cheese. Fry for a minute. Stir in the fish sauce then serve.

Cambodian Stir-Fry Vegetables With Pork

I used to eat this dish, and countless variations of it, in cheap, road-side cafes and stalls when I was working in Cambodia’s stifling capital Phnom Penh. The heat meant you were never that hungry, just thirsty, and I drank more melted ice than beer.

But this meal and other stir-fried dishes like it were perfect for kickstarting the appetite without bloating you out, and more importantly they were delicious. They were never over seasoned or spiced, and there was always a plastic tray of condiments on each table so you could tweak the flavour as you wished – fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar, lime wedges, ground white and black pepper.

The stir-fried vegetables came in numerous permutations, sometimes with meat or fish, sometimes without, and were often flavoured with oyster sauce. They were cooked fresh in front of you and served in silver bowls, with another silver dish containing sticky rice. And the thing I loved most was you always got a ramekin of thinly sliced chillies on the side, that gave a burst of fire and helped the whole thing down.

Those were wonderful days on the whole, and I miss them dearly. And occasionally when the British weather gets the better of me, and gives me a shot of the low-down blues, I make myself one of these dishes, like this one I made for lunch today – stir-fried vegetables with pork. Which if my very rusty Khmer doesn’t embarrass me too much is known over there as sach chrouk char pale khieu.

Anyway, this is how I made the dish and it turned out pretty well. It goes without saying that you can substitute pretty much any other protein for the pork – popular choices in Cambodia are frog, shrimp, squid, crab, fish, eel, chicken, beef and egg. Or just leave it out and have vegetables, maybe with nuts added.

In fact, one of the most memorable dishes I had was fried cabbage and rice with lots of chilli on the side, cooked as a staff meal at one of the restaurants I was working in. It doesn’t get much simpler than that, but they do say the secret of being a good cook, or any other artist for that matter, is knowing when to stop.

Again, for the vegetables, it really doesn’t matter which ones you use. Cambodians cooks are very skilled at making the best of what they’ve got, which for the vast majority of Khmer people is usually very little. I used broccoli, onion, cabbage and carrot, and a few slices of roast pork that were left over from the weekend. The secret is to cut everything small, so it cooks quickly.

Nearly all Cambodian dishes start with fried garlic, so I heated some oil in a pan, sliced two fat cloves of garlic, and fried them, stirring away until they were just turning nutty and brown. Then I added a few thin strips of roast pork. Probably no more than about 50g or so – in keeping with the Cambodian way of making a little meat go a long way.

After all, it’s the flavour that is the main thing – and there is no better way of ruining a stir-fry, aside from burning or over salting it, than drowning it in meat or fish. I fried this for a couple of minutes until the oil was frothing, then added the vegetables, and fried them for a couple of minutes – they generally need very little more than this if they are cut properly.

Just before the end, I added the seasoning – two level tablespoons of oyster sauce, the same of water, then a good sprinkle of fish sauce (about two level teaspoons) and the same of lime juice, and finally half a teaspoon of sugar, and a good grind of white pepper. It went on a plate with rice, and of course thinly sliced chillies, and was demolished quickly, harkening back memories of warmer times.

Salted Cod And Cashew Nut Curry

This recipe was partly inspired by Cambodia's national dish, amok - river fish cooked with mild spices and coconut. Amok varies enormously from home to home over there. Most resemble a sort of runny, yellow curry, but the supposedly authentic ones are steamed in banana leaves and, with the addition of beaten egg, come out like souffles. So chaotic is the dish, you could say it runs ... oh, never mind.

Salted fish is also an important ingredient for the Khmers, and works well in this curry. As for the cashew nuts, you can pick them off the trees over there. Remember to only add salt at the end, if necessary, as it is difficult to estimate how salty the fish is and how much soaking it will need. Obviously the saltier you like it, the less soaking it needs.

300g salt cod or pollack, skinless and boneless
2 medium onions, finely chopped
6 garlic cloves
4 green cardamon pods
4 cloves
2 tsps ground coriander
2 tsps ground turmeric
1 tsp cumin seeds
2 tbsps olive oil
6 red chillies, fewer if you don't like heat
1 tsp vinegar
1 tsp sugar
1 large yellow or orange pepper, diced
1 bay leaf
120g tinned tomatoes, chopped
400ml coconut milk
20 cashew nuts

Soak the salted fish overnight in a saucepan full of cold water. Change the water a couple of times. Heat the oil in a pressure cooker and add the chopped onion. Stir and cook over a medium heat for 10 minutes until reduced heavily in size. Add the diced pepper, bay leaf and garlic and cook for another few minutes, stirring regularly.

Add the cardamon, cumin, turmeric, coriander, sugar and vinegar. Stir for a minute, adding a splash of water if the spices start to catch. Add the tomatoes and coconut milk.

Cover the pressure cooker, bring up to pressure, and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring half way through. Then add the fish, cut into inch-wide pieces, cashew nuts and whole red chillies. Stir well and cover the pressure cooker again. Simmer for 30 minutes, stirring half way through.

Serve with fresh coriander, salad and boiled rice.

Clam Chowder - Level 2 NVQ Diploma in Hospitality

Week one of my cooking apprenticeship certainly had a ‘surf and turf’ flavour to it. On the morning we made beef olives, we also knocked up another classic from the attic – clam chowder. Well, the chowder base anyway. We needed gallons of the stuff for a seafood festival that weekend. The soup would be finished off on the day and served in hollowed-out crusty rolls for £4 a pop.

Because we were making the base a few days in advance, our tutor told us not to add the bacon and to use powdered fish stock rather than fresh, to help it keep longer. The bacon, clams and cream would be added on the day.

I’ve always been a big fan of chowder and have wanted to travel to America’s blustery Atlantic coast ever since I read Moby Dick, when Ishmael and Queequeg feast at the Try Pots, a rough inn famed for its chowder “plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt”.

As always, I can’t find much agreement about clam chowder’s history among the many food boffins. Some posit it may derive from ‘chaudrée’ – a thick fish soup from France’s Charente-Maritime region. The variant, chowda, is believed to have originated in Newfoundland when fishermen would throw part of the day’s catch into a large pot for supper.

Not that it really matters, of course, because there is even less agreement about how to cook the dish. Indeed in 1939, as war was breaking out in Europe, politicians in Maine were fussing over the far more pressing issue of drafting legislation to make it illegal to add tomatoes to their traditional, cream-thickened chowder.

The type we made on our snappily-titled Level 2 NVQ Diploma in Hospitality (7132) course was definitely of the New England camp – a tasty base of potatoes, onions, peppers, carrots and bacon. Although I’m sure many purists would turn their noses up at carrots and peppers, and insist the only break from the calico broth should be pink cubes of bacon.

Flour added to the sweated vegetables

Again, some people use biscuits as a thickening rather than flour. But we used the latter. The lesson came with a short aside about using roux (equal amounts of flour and fat) to thicken sauces. For a ‘white roux’ - for use in white sauces - you fry the flour and fat over a low heat for five minutes, for a ‘blonde roux’ – the base for veloute (velvety) sauces – you cook the flour out for 10 minutes, and for a ‘brown roux’ – for gravies etc. – you could it for 20 minutes.

125ml vegetable oil

125g plain flour

125g diced smoked bacon

2 large onions, cut into brunoise

2 large carrots, cut into brunoise

2 large sticks celery, cut into 1cm dice

2 large yellow peppers, cut into 1cm dice

5 garlic cloves, finely chopped

2 large potatoes, cut into 1cm dice

2.5 litres fish stock

200ml double cream

2kg carpet clams

In a large saucepan, heat the oil and sweat the onions, potatoes, celery, carrots, bacon, garlic and peppers over a low heat for 10 minutes, stirring regularly. Once soft, but not coloured, add the flour and cook out for five minutes, stirring all the time.

Heat the stock and add a ladleful at a time to the roux, making sure the liquid is fully dissolved until adding the next batch. Simmer for 10 minutes. Season to taste. This can then be cooled and left covered in the fridge for a couple of days until you are ready to use it.

The finished chowder base

Wash the clams well and discard any that are open or broken. For my money, the best in the UK are the small carpet clams you get in Portland, Dorset – called palourde in France and almeja in Spain. Put them in a covered pan over a medium heat and cook until they are open – this should take only a minute or two.

Add the cream to the chowder base and the poached clams and serve with plenty of crusty bread. Garnish with finely chopped chives and black pepper. Some people also whisk in 125g of butter to give a good glaze to the bowl, but then some people eat butter the thickness of bread.

Beef Olives - Level 2 NVQ Diploma in Hospitality

They say you never stop learning about food, which is why I've just started a Level 2 NVQ Diploma in Hospitality at the tender age of 84.That and also because I need the paperwork. My plan is to get a job on the yachts cooking for people with too much money, and for that you need food qualifications, I'm told, not just kitchen experience.

Anyway, I've just finished the second week on the course, and I'm loving every second. Well, not every second, but it's going much better than I dared hope. My plan is to blog the recipes and techniques I'm learning each week, so I'll start with beef olives - a meal we knocked up for the training restaurant.

I'm not sure about the history of the dish, but according to the 18th century cookery writer Hannah Glasse there are references to "beef olives" in Scottish cooking as far back as the 16th century. This doesn't mean it's a Scottish dish. It shares just as much with the rouladen dishes that grace German cookery, as well as the zrazy dishes of Eastern Europe.

Of course, it'll be much older than any literary reference. I imagine cave men were rolling up slices of silverside mammoth and slowly cooking them with vegetables in hollowed out rocks way before anyone knew what an olive was. A far cry from the Rational combi ovens we're lucky enough to use in the training kitchen, but the principle is the same. Batter cheaper cuts of meat to make them tender, roll them up, and then cook for a long time until soft and full of flavour.

We were making a huge batch, using two large joints of topside of beef weighing around 3kg each. But just reduce the quantities accordingly if you're not cooking for a crowd.

6kg topside of beef
6 cups red wine
2kg sausagemeat
Salt, pepper
6 litres beef stock
6 large onions
12 carrots
12 sticks celery
12 cloves garlic
6 tbsps vegetable oil

It's much easier to slice the beef if it is still slightly frozen, or well chilled, as it will hold together better. Using a very sharp cook's knife, cut the beef into finger-wide slices. Take each piece and put between clingfilm and batter with a rolling pin until about a third of the width.

Take off the clingfilm, and season the beef with salt and pepper. Spread the meat with sausagemeat, a few milimetres thick. Then roll up into a tight sausage shape. Cover with clingfilm then roll on your board, holding each end of the clingfilm, until it is a compact cylinder shape. Repeat with each slice and chill in the fridge for an hour so they firm up.

Meanwhile, finely dice the onion into brunoise. Peel the celery and carrots, quarter them lengthways and cut into paysanne - a sort of curved, triangular shape. Put three large roasting trays on the heat and pour 2tbps of oil into each one. Add the onions, garlic, carrot and celery and begin to brown. Stir regularly until they have some colour.

Unwrap the beef olives and tie each with butcher's string using three slipknots. Add the olives to the pan and turn over from time to time until they are evenly browned, then pour two cups of  red wine into each tray.

Cook off the wine for a few minutes, then add two litres of beef stock into each tray. Bring to a simmer, cover each tray with foil and put in a pre-heated oven at 180C for two hours.
Serve with mashed potato and seasonal veg.

Courgette Summer Fried Rice

This is a very good way of using up cooked rice from the night before and makes an excellent breakfast. It's also a good way of using up courgettes from a garden or allotment, especially as there is usually a glut at this time of year as people start reaching for well-thumbed cooking books, and wonder if they do make a huge batch of courgette pickle, there is any chance they'll actually eat it, and won't just offload it on friends at Christmas.

Even if, like me, you're not lucky enough to have a garden, and the rake on your balcony is just for cockles, no doubt you'll be in a similar position. I've had three massive, marrow-like courgettes propped among the cider cans in my fridge for about a week now, after a friend visited proudly bearing gifts from her garden. 

Every time I've opened the fridge, I've had a mild grip of guilt as I've seen those speckled, Lincoln green logs peering at me mournfully. Well, what better way to appease some guilt and free up more cider space than frying up one of these lovelies in this rather tasty fried rice dish?

2 bowls of cooked rice

Half a medium onion, finely chopped

Half a huge courgette, diced

1 stick celery, chopped

2 eggs

3 tsps fish sauce

2 mild green chillies, thinly sliced

2 tbsps sunflower oil

2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

1 large tomato, or 2 medium, diced

Handful frozen peas (come on, it wouldn't be fried rice without peas!)

Heat a large frying pan or wok over a high heat for a minute or two, while you chop up your vegetables. Pour in the oil, then heat for 20 seconds or so until it begins to smoke. Then throw in the onion, courgette, celery, tomato, frozen peas, garlic and chillies and stir continually for two minutes until the courgette has (finally!) reduced in size by about a half. 

Then throw in the cooked rice, breaking up any rice lumps with your wooden spoon, and fry for another three minutes, stirring all the time. Add the fish sauce, and stir again. Check for seasoning, and add salt and pepper to taste, if needed. 

Make a well in the rice and crack in the eggs, stirring them up until they're scrambled and cooked through. Fry for another two minutes, stirring all the time, and serve.

This is excellent with some Thai-style sweet chilli sauce. I also like to serve it with a Cambodian 'tuk trey' dressing. To make this, put 2 tbsps of fish sauce and 2 tbsps of water in a ramekin or similar vessel, and stir in a pinch of sugar, a squeeze of lime, and one chopped green chilli.

My Death Row Meal: Spanish Roast Lamb

I finally realised it the other night. I was wandering through the streets of Aguilas, a small, seaside town in southeast Spain, looking for a place to watch England get knocked out of the World Cup.

When I say was looking for the football, more than anything I was looking for something to eat. I hadn’t eaten all day. It was late at night. And opening times in Spain are always chaotic.

I walked back home and there she was. She was finally open. The old woman’s restaurant I’d heard so much about. The TV was on. Either she wasn’t showing the game, or it was half-time, but I was too hungry to care.

I looked at a rich-looking couple sitting outside, enjoying wine and a great spread of tapas. The hot evening air streaming down purple and the distant flicker of Venus brick-red.

Inside, the old woman was nagging at her husband to finish his cigarette and start on the washing up. He walked past me. World-weary, wine-shadowed eyes. He glanced at me with an expression that was hard to read, but seemed to say “don’t get married”. He scuttled off to the kitchen and I heard the clink of plates.

I looked at the tapas on the bar. 11.30 at night. Where else would you find food like that? I thought about Boris, the man who urged me to write a book about training to be a chef - a journey that failed miserably when I ran out of money and was forced to return to the 9 to 5 rather than the 9am to 5am.

He’d told me to buy an “old jalopy and scootle down to Spain and learn the knives”. “Spain,” I remember him saying breathlessly as he sank another oyster, “is the food capital of the world!” 

That was seven maybe eight years ago.

I ordered another beer and looked at the food again - meatballs in salsa, fried fish, hake roe, pimientos spread like oil paintings over clay. A similar hue to the sandstone cliffs that house the troglodyte caves where they once dried weed for baskets, and the hollows where the Romans fermented garum - a sort of Centurion’s Worcestershire sauce.

The old woman opened a huge metal oven, and the bar was filled with the smell of almond wood. She pulled out two huge steaks and headed to the rich couple’s table.

The game came on. No overpaid, half-time punditry from crisps-peddlers here, just adverts. Then I spotted it. The menu of the day. A huge roasting tray filled with potatoes the size of giants’ toes, and legs and shoulders of lamb - cooked not to pinkness, but to falling-away succulence.

She heaped a metal plate and put it in the wood oven to warm through, then asked whether I wanted salad to kick things off. She suggested pimientos.

A plate arrived with a basket of bread. Green and red streaks from Van Gogh’s palette, studded with black olives, and draped in garlic. Seconds later the peppers were snatched and the lamb arrived.

A whole front leg and parts of shoulder. Half a kilo of potatoes roasted not in the usual way, but more like fondant spuds - stewed in the lamb juices so the bottom was soft and the top wreathed in smoke and crisp from the fire.

It was incredible. I pulled off a huge strand of meat and munched. If I had one more meal - my Death Row Meal - this would be it. You'd hardly worry about the calories. The bone was thick, the meat was thick, the juice was thick, the fat was soon thick around my lips and hands.

The meat juices were seasoned with whole black peppercorns, sprigs of thyme and rosemary, the garlic papery and unpeeled. The taste was magical. Onions, a little white wine, but not much else. What else?

The lamb had been fattened on the nearby cliffs, munching samphire, wild rosemary and thyme. My word did this beast have flavour. I was half-way there, bursting. I picked up the leg bone like a troglodyte. Juice smeared, fat everywhere.

Uruguay scored again. “Goooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaal!” roared the Spanish commentator. His favourite part of the job. The stadium went wild. 

The dish deserved more applause. The woman asked me if I wanted postre. Just another cold beer. I washed my face, I washed my fingers, and then I told her what an excellent meal it was. She looked happy.

I sat outside, barely able to move. My stomach thrust towards Venus. The couple were now on gin and tonics and chocolate desserts. I looked at the sign. I hadn’t seen it earlier. There it was - asado cordero.

My bill came. Three beers, half a sheep and enough potatoes to sink a freighter for 16 euros. Where else in the world would you get a meal like that? Only in Spain. Only in Spain. Then the trap door fell open.

Lamb Hearts Braised In Scrumpy

Hearts are a very underestimated choice of meat, and should be used much more than they are. Not only because they are cheap - around £3.50 per kg - but because they have a delicious flavour and texture. They also have just enough fat to thicken the meat liquor slightly.

It is important you use a decent cider for this. Ideally a good scrumpy, but if you’ve drunk it all, a full-bodied still cider will do. The other beauty of this dish is it takes only a couple of minutes to prepare, if that. You just bung it in the oven and wait for it to cook while finishing off the rest of the cider.  

LAMB HEARTS BRAISED IN SCRUMPY

(Serves 2)

2 lamb hearts

1 pint scrumpy

2 carrots, diced

2 slices swede, diced

4 sticks celery, diced

2 garlic cloves, chopped

Salt, pepper

1 tsp fresh thyme, chopped

Two handfuls of frozen peas

Wash the hearts and put them in a casserole dish. Surround with the diced vegetables, thyme and garlic. Pour in the cider and season the hearts and vegetables liberally with salt and pepper. Cover the dish with foil and cook in a pre-heated, medium oven for one hour.

Take out, remove the foil, and stir the vegetables, and turn the hearts over. Add the peas, put the foil back on, and cook in the oven for another 15 minutes. Serve with a baked potato and plenty of English mustard. 

Parsley Soup: An Indubitable Hangover Cure

Don’t ask me why, but I find this soup makes a great hangover cure. Perhaps it’s because I associate it with the time I lived in London and would restore my flagging spirits and woollen head when I eventually rose on a Sunday afternoon, all a quiver with shakes and punched kidneys, and a liver a French farmer would be proud of, a dreadful thirst for milk, and vague recollections of the night before and the night before that, and disturbingly-vivid dreams of being captured by cannibals, and shrunken heads, and then I would wander out, and as the pub singer goes have a beer for breakfast and one more for dessert, and then head down to a pie and mash shop in Peckham, and fill myself with mashed potato.

Not the hideously-rich, sauce-like pomme puree stuff Marco Pierre White and a young, podgy Gordon Ramsay would knock out in those Harveys days, with the steaming potatoes straight into the Robot with a hod’s worth of butter and hot milk, and whizzed and topped up with more milk until it came out like pale custard.

But simple mashed spuds with just a suggestion of margarine and a cup of the river water they were cooked in. And soon, but never quite soon enough, everything would be alright with the world, and then I’d have that awful, kick-in-the-stomach start that tomorrow was Monday and I’d have to be somewhere dreadful like Hastings, with a notebook in my hand, braving the sneers and gob from the fag chuffers outside the magistrates’ court.

But it wasn’t the mashed potatoes and the dreadfully cheap and mean, but strangely acceptable Sweeney Todd pies, but the sauce, or liquor, that accompanied them. Made from, or at least claimed to have been made from, the Thames water that the eels were boiled in, with onions and pepper and bay leaves, and a garden of parsley so that there were more green specks than grey. I used to love mixing that parsley liquor with the mash and then covering the whole lot with a clattering of white pepper.

Anyway, they say food reminds you of hangovers, or vice versa. And I can positively posit that this very simple soup really does the job when it comes to banishing the evil-spirits aftermath of the morning after, when you wake feverishly with the taste of rum and lime juice in your throat, and a mint you know didn’t come from toothpaste, as you wake crumpled on the floor, the wood burner long gone out, and your face as ashen as the mound that remains of last night’s logs, and a Robben Island cold in your bones, your head rattling as though filled with dried acorns, and knowing you forgot to eat again.

And despite the hunger, there is very little you can face but parsley and potatoes, and certainly not last night’s hardly-touched kebab sealed with lamb-fat candle wax as it surely will be if the trails down your jacket are anything to go by, and then realising the pie and mash shop closed long ago, and besides you live in the country now and the nearest is a 39-mile drive.

And as you brave opening your eyes once again, and mentally scan the churlishly-empty pantry, and a dim hope ascends with bitter juice humming of rum, as you realise you’ve just about got enough ingredients to make a steaming pot of parsley soup. And an hour or so later, you’re very glad you did as you metal-scrape the last with bread, your spirits restored and last night’s bottles cleared, and a smugness that you remembered to put the bin out for once after tripping over next door’s cat, the apple missing like an England seamer, and then remember that the next day you won’t have to be in Hastings, but somewhere far, far worse.

PARSLEY SOUP

(Serves 2 with seconds)

2 medium onions

3 medium potatoes

Knob of butter

3 garlic cloves

One massive bunch of parsley

One litre of boiling water

Salt, pepper

Natural yoghurt

Cayenne pepper

Chop the onions  and add to a saucepan with the butter, and fry over a medium flame, stirring from time to time. Peel and dice the potatoes and add to the pan. Chop the garlic and add to the pan. Fry for a few minutes until the onions have softened.

Wash the parsley well in a tub of water to ensure any grit sinks to the bottom, then slice off the stalks and chop them finely. Add to the pan and fry for another minute or so. Boil a kettle and add about one litre of water to the pan.

Simmer until the potatoes can be pierced easily with a knife - about 15 minutes, depending on the flame and type of potatoes and what altitude you’re cooking at, and other immeasurables.

Chop the rest of the parsley and put in the pot and simmer for a minute, then blitz in a liquidiser or use one of those blender sticks, or just attack the soup with a potato masher. Season to taste with salt and pepper. It goes very well with a dollop of yoghurt and a generous dusting of cayenne pepper, if your stomach can handle it.

Pork Carnitas: The Quick Way (Put That On Your Tacometer)

There are many recipes for this classic Mexican pork snack - usually involving great hunks of pig that are cooked for hours until they can be pulled apart with blunt spoons. 

Here is a much quicker version I was given by a man I met in a lift in San Jose in Costa Rica. He swears by it and so do I. 

You nestle a spoonful or two of the greasy, fragrant pork in a warmed tortilla, and then roll it up. I like them on their own, but add whatever to the taco - guacamole, sour cream, grated cheese, lettuce, chopped tomatoes, salsa, jalapenos, refried beans et al. 

What’s important is getting the pork bit right, without burning up half the North Sea's gas - unless you like throwing your money to the profit-chasing, rip-off Big Six energy cartel. Here goes...

PORK CARNITAS

(Serves 2)

350g pork shoulder steaks

4 large garlic cloves

2 cups or more of water

1 tsp cumin seeds

2 tsps oregano leaves

Salt, pepper

Slice the pork into short, thin strips, about a centimetre wide. Don’t trim the fat as this adds to the flavour and you don’t use any other oil in the recipe. Put a frying pan over a medium heat and when hot, throw in the pork and allow to brown slightly before giving it a stir.

The fat (and water injected into the pork if it is supermarket-bought) should lubricate the pan to stop it catching when you give it a stir. If not, add a knob of lard or beef dripping or something. Continue browning for a few minutes, and then throw in a pinch or two of salt and pepper, and the cumin seeds.

Keep stirring and browning the pork. Then finely chop the garlic and add to the pan and brown the pork for another few minutes (notice how many times I'm irritatingly using the word 'brown' - that's what the whole recipe's about). It should be evenly browned by the end (and once more). Then add a cup of water. Don’t completely submerge the pork - there should be bits sticking out.

Stir well and allow this to bubble away until it is reduced to a syrup. Then add another cup of water and stir occasionally until it is reduced. Keep repeating the process until the pork has been cooking for about an hour. Five minutes from the end, chop the oregano leaves and add to the pan.

When the pork has been cooking for an hour, test a piece - it should be soft and not at all chewy. Boil away the last of the liquid until the pork is coated in a glossy syrup.

Remove the pork and then clean out the pan with a piece of bread. Put the pan back on the heat and warm the tortillas in it, turning from time to time. Put a spoon or two of pork in the middle of the tortilla, top with lettuce, salsa sauce, grated cheese, chilli peppers etc and roll up and eat with your fingers, like you're Tuco Salamanca in Breaking Bad (who, fittingly, the bloke in the lift reminded me of in some ways).

Chicken And Black Bean Stew

I’ve been getting into South American and Mexican food lately after re-reading the beautifully-photographed World Food Cafe recipe book and authors Chris and Carolyn Caldicott’s travels through the orange-sunset Americas.

As I sit here, barely able to type with frozen hands, and the woodburning stove behind me spluttering the last log, filling me with Withnail-ian thoughts of burning the furniture, despite what little there is in my ramshackle cottage, I can’t think of a place I’d rather be than Brazil.

This recipe is a take on the South American country’s traditional black bean stew. Normally, you’d add a few vegetables like cubes of carrots, sweet potatoes and turnips or something, and in the Caldicotts’ book, no meat. But this is all I had in the cupboard, and as it turned out pretty well and kept the cold at bay for an hour or two, especially with the high chilli content, I thought I’d share it with you...  

CHICKEN AND BLACK BEAN STEW

(serves 2)

6 chicken drumsticks

2 small onions

4 fat cloves of garlic

1 tbsp beef dripping

2 teaspoons cumin seeds

2 teaspoons extra hot chilli powder

2 handfuls of fresh coriander

Salt

400g tin of black turtle beans

Melt the dripping in a pot and fry the drumsticks on all sides until lightly browned. Roughly chop the onions and garlic cloves and add them to the pot, stirring away over a medium flame for a couple of minutes. Add the cumin seeds and continue to fry for another minute or so.

Add half a cup of water and cook away, turning the chicken from time to time, until the water has evaporated into a thick syrup, then add another half cup of water and the chilli powder.

Put the coriander in a tub of water and wash well, then leave in the water so any mud sinks to the bottom of the tub (there is nothing worse than grit in a stew). Cut or twist off the roots and leave the leaves in the water. Roughly chop the roots and add them to the pot and cook for another ten minutes, adding a little more water if necessary.

Add the turtle beans (including the purple liquid the beans come with) and stir for a minute until thoroughly coated. Cook over a low heat for another five minutes, stirring from time to time, and at the end add salt to taste and stir in the chopped coriander leaves.

Serve with warm tortillas (which you can heat either by putting them on top of the woodburning stove, or by turning them a couple of times in a dry frying pan, or pinging them for 30 seconds in a microwave if you’ve got one).

How To Make Soup In A Hotel Room Kettle

I’ve always been amazed how good food tastes when you’re hungry, and this was no exception. I got back late to my hotel room, absolutely famished. None of the restaurants were open. So I decided to cook myself something using the $4 kettle I’d bought from the market. It was my second attempt at cooking in a kettle after the pleasures of the duck eggs I’d boiled up earlier. In fact, they were the only thing I’d eaten all day.

I’d been planning on boiling, or ‘kettling’ to give the cooking technique its proper name, some diced potatoes and sliced snake beans, and then serving them with a few slices of corned beef and tomato for my next experiment - a recipe Bruce had highly recommended.

“I have a couple of slices with my potatoes, which I cook in my hotel room with my little electric kettle, with some slices of cucumber and tomato, and I always bring a genuine pot of English mustard when I fly in from Australia - I’m in heaven!”

He used to bring Colman’s Mustard wrapped in cling film, smuggled in with his hand language, along with a stash of Oxo cubes he’d sometimes hand to restaurants to make gravy for his pies. I hadn’t even got any of the cheap, nasty, vinegary Dijon stuff French expats like out here as they stretch out their invalidity benefits.

But when I picked up the tin of corned beef, I saw the key had fallen off. I wasn’t going to search for a tin opener at 4am on an unlit street in Cambodia, and the handle of my large Thai knife that said “Kiwi Brand” on the label, but had “Kiwi Brandy” engraved on the blade, was far too flimsy to stab into the tin.

So I decided to jump that stage and go for soup. Bruce told me he normally just puts a centimetre of water in the kettle, pours in a tin of Heinz soup and simmers it for five minutes, stirring all the time with his wooden spoon.

I had two potatoes, a tomato, four red chillies, a handful of snake beans, an onion, and no tin, or not one I could open anyway. But I still had the napkin of salt and pepper I’d got from the cafe across the road. It didn’t look too promising, but I was too hungry to care.

Then I remembered the head of garlic I’d been using in the ridiculous belief it would ward off snakes. Someone had found a small one in one of the rooms. It must have wriggled under the door, and I was on the bottom floor and was taking no chances. When I heard that a backpacker had been sunbathing on the balcony when a large serpent had crawled over the back of her legs, I’d have taken any advice on the matter.

So I found myself listening when a Khmer friend told me that snakes don’t like garlic. They don’t go near the stuff, apparently. I don’t know if it’s the sight or smell. I didn’t ask. It was hard enough getting that much. But she said many people in her village left garlic around in their houses, especially during the rainy season when rising waters bring huge pythons and other serpents to the area.

Perhaps the snake had come up through the toilet? And how big did they mean by ‘small’? A small one wouldn’t have been able to get up there, would it? I checked, and the toilet lid was still down. Then I put a couple of books on top just to make sure.

I staggered around the badly-lit room for a bit looking in the corners, while trying to think of something else, anything else, then remembered what I was doing, and poured 250ml of water into the kettle. Not that I had a measuring jug or anything. I know because I used pretty much all of a 330ml bottle, and when I downed the rest there was little more than a triple in there. You wouldn’t complain about the measure, put it that way.

But the problems started when I tried to switch on the kettle. I kept wiggling the lead in the socket, but the red light wouldn’t go on. It was much worse than last time. For minutes I tried, changing plug socket and pushing the lead into all sorts of contortions, until I found that the light went on briefly if I jammed the socket upwards and twisted slightly. The dodgy electrics roared up, the light went on, then off, then stayed on again for a minute.

But every time I let go, the lead fell out of the kettle. I jammed a pen under the socket but it was too wide. Eventually I found the perfect device - one of those tiny toothpaste tubes they give you in hotels. The light stayed on. And then the water slowly started to bubble.

I used a ledge by the sink to deal with the vegetables, listening out for the faint, pleasing roar of the kettle. In my drunken haze, with my stomach gurgling and the fan making its wheezing, scraping noise, it was difficult to hear the kettle from the bathroom. I darted out a few times, delighted each time I saw the red light still on. I lifted the lid and the water was bubbling cheerfully.

Normally, most soups in Cambodia are started by heating water in a pan, and adding a little sugar, salt, fish sauce or prahok, and maybe some slices of galangal, garlic, onion or shallot, and one or two kaffir lime leaves, and a couple of whole or sliced lemon grass stalks to start the broth before you add vegetables, meat or fish. Then when it’s cooked, you season again and top each bowl with fried garlic, chopped culantro, and sliced spring onion tops.

All I had was salt, pepper, chilli and garlic. But I knew that adding salt at the start as the Cambodians do, would mean it’d take longer because salt makes water boil at a higher temperature. That meant more strain on the kettle, and it must have taken 20 minutes just to get a faint bubble, and the light had already gone off a couple of times even with the toothpaste tube wedged under the socket. I’d put the salt and pepper in at the end.

I went back into the bathroom and examined the veg. I’d stupidly left them tied up in plastic bags on the spare bed, because I didn’t want ants running up and down the walls. They’ll eat anything those bastards - even toothpaste. But it had done nothing for the vegetables.

The snake beans were now a putrid, sludgy grey and looked more like a bag of mouldy prahok. And one of the potatoes was rotten. I sliced the peel off the good potato, cutting on a split, plastic bag on the sink. I thinly sliced it and carefully added the pieces to the kettle, a few at a time, terrified that any ripple would knock the socket out.

Then I roughly chopped the onion and added it gingerly. I cut off the few remaining green bits from the snake beans. There was hardly anything there. But I sliced them anyway, thinking it would be good for the colour. Then I did the same with the tomato. I chopped up two of the four chillies and added the lot to the kettle.

It was bubbling away nicely and the potatoes were softening. Then I sliced hunks from four cloves of garlic and added them. The light went off a few more times, so I was too scared to stir much. Not just because I was worried about the jolting, but because I only had a metal fork to stir with.

Then I started hearing cracking noises. The bed-side cupboard had a glass top, or at least it looked and felt like glass, and the plastic base of the kettle was set on that. But I couldn’t see any cracks or fractures. I looked at the new sign on the bathroom door. It hadn’t been there the last time I stayed.

I stood there swaying, more hungry than drunk, counting down the minutes until the veg was cooked. The smell was incredible. It’s amazing what hunger does to your taste buds. There’s nothing like building up an appetite on a Sunday morning walk and then finishing it off with a decent roast in a proper pub. The anticipation is everything.

I wondered if they were thinking the same down the corridor. I looked at rule six on the wall: “Please do not cock or use iron in your room and smoking in bed is not advesable.” I lifted the lid carefully. The potatoes had broken up nicely, thickening the soup, which had now taken on a light brownness I hadn’t notice at first with the poor lighting. There was another crack. Or was it a scrape? I looked at the glass top again, and then checked the books on the toilet.

Surely the surface was designed for a kettle? In any other hotel for the same price, you’d get a cup and saucer. Sometimes a couple of biscuits, or a sachet of sugar to eat as well. I was starving. I gave it another careful stir. I pulled the socket out and gave the kettle a few shakes, then stabbed the potatoes and tomato with the fork to break them up more. I added some salt and pepper and waited for the soup to cool.

It was hard to judge the seasoning. I didn’t know what ratio of salt to pepper was in the mix. And when I licked my finger and dabbed one side of the napkin it was mainly pepper, but then I’d try another side and it smacked pleasantly of salt. But there was definitely far more pepper.

I’d done the cafe manoeuvre so quickly, it was impossible to know, and with the white background of the napkin you had no hope of spotting the salt-rich areas, especially in that light. It’d have to have a very peppery kick to get the salt right.

I’d written about this before, about how when I was training to be a chef, they taught me to season the soup at the end, gradually adding pinches of salt and pepper until the flavour was perfect. They lectured me about how adding salt in gradual stages has a peculiar effect on soup – it suddenly turns from an amalgam of competing flavours to a clear taste in just a few granules. There’s a section on it in Herve This' book Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavour. This did experiments with salt by giving people seasoned and unseasoned soups. Without the salt, they found it difficult identifying the type of soup it was.

It was certainly true of my veggie broth - it didn’t taste of anything. I gave the kettle a good stir and added more seasoning, and tried it again. It needed far more salt. I chopped up the other two chillies and threw them in, and added more of what I now knew was basically pepper.

I stirred again, and tried another mouthful. I was trying to eat soup with a fork. It had come to this. I had one of those moments when you look at yourself and wonder what happened, and then try to shrug it off by thinking it might make an eBook. It needed to be thicker, otherwise I’d just be eating veg in a thin coating of broth.

I let the kettle sit there for another few minutes, cooling and thickening, as I forked the veg. I would have done anything for some bread, a couple of thickly-buttered hunks of granary crust, seasoned with celery salt and a dusting of cayenne pepper. Not that it needed extra spice. The soup was explosive already, but it could still take some more salt. I added another handful of pepper mix. The chilli and pepper came at you like wild dogs, one distracting as the other took hold, and soon the sweat was running down my face. It was absolutely delicious.

I was so hungry, I wolfed it down, trying to lap up as much of the broth as I could with the prongs of the fork. As I got further down, I began swigging from the kettle, swilling it round like a mug. Then as I got lower, I noticed black marks at the bottom where the veg had caught.

It was a salutary lesson in the much overlooked art of hotel room cooking. But if anything, it had given the soup a slightly caramelised taste, the sort of notes you get from frying a white mirepoix of onions, celery, garlic and leek whites for 30 minutes. Not to that colour admittedly. I’d be sacked for doing that. But I was cooking in an almost unfurnished hotel room using a kettle with a dodgy socket. I told myself that the autumnal colour was not just down to burning, but the generous handfuls of pepper.

I finished the soup with sweat running down my chest and back, and I’d begun hiccupping from the pepper. Even sitting directly in front of the second fan I’d convinced them to give me made no difference. I had one can of beer left but it was far too warm too drink.

I tipped the last bits of soup I couldn’t fork down the sink, and washed the vessel out as best I could with the tap trickling away like an incontinent mouse. Then I filled the kettle with water, remembering the way Bruce had told me to self-clean it, and tried to connect the lead again.

I dried my hands and wiggled away for a few minutes, but there wasn’t even a flash of light this time. I gave up and put the kettle back in the bathroom. I thought that old woman at the market had a smile on her face.

MORE: Wake Up To A Full Cambodian: Chicken Porridge Soup

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