Fish, Flour And a Frypan
It’s a natural that the recipe for fish cooked in flour should come from a mill on a river. Plenty of flour and, in those pre-pollution days, plenty of fish.
Professional cooks reckon that cooking fish like the miller’s wife, as in à la meunière, is the best way to cook swimmers of all sorts. They’re [...]
Pasta With Praties
An Irish joke? Pasta with praties? Why not? I adore hot potatoes on bread as well. And chip sandwiches. And even, spare me, squashed potato crisps stuck between slices of bread.
Pasta with potatoes makes as much sense as cream with ice cream. But haven’t we all done that, and loved it? The funny thing about [...]
A Plaintive Cry For Sardines
Sardines are super fish. My life’s work now is to convince the missus and the kids that this devotion is not another strange quirk of my behaviour: something like listening to the radio twenty-four hours a day, or wanting a gnome in a Hawthorn jumper in the garden, or hoarding that pile of old New [...]
Apple And Nectarine Tart
There are thousands of apple pie recipes; chunky apple pies, pies filled with purees, pies with lids and pies without. There are pies mixed with pears and quinces and dried fruits. And there’s this one, mixing two of the great fruits of autumn.
Autumn is the perfect time for fruit pies. When the nights get longer, [...]
Eggplant With Pesto And Chilli
1 eggplant
1 chilli, chopped finely
olive oil
½ cup pesto
2 cloves garlic, chopped finely
1
Cook the eggplant in the microwave until softened, as above.
2
Once the eggplant has been cooked and cooled, remove the flesh from the skin and chop roughly.
3
Heat a little olive oil in a heavy-based pan, and cook the garlic and chilli gently, until the garlic [...]
Risotto With Dried Mushrooms
With rice in the cupboard, you know you’re going to get a good feed. Sometimes you need to make do with lucky breaks, like that old packet of dried mushrooms in the back of the pantry.
Any decent, and not so decent, Italian deli will have a cache of dried mushrooms stuck in a dusty corner. [...]
A Salad For Lovers
I put this together for a Valentine’s Day article. Treat it somewhere between seriously and a laugh.
Read this with your lover, to your lover, or on your own, thinking of your lover. Not the person you’d like to be your lover. The person you’ve actually done it with. Somebody with whom you’ve shared everything and [...]
Quick Satay Sauce
This is not a traditional Malaysian recipe. We made it up to approximate the flavour of satay sauce, with ingredients that are pretty much in every kitchen.
½ cup peanut butter
1 chilli
2 teaspoons soy sauce
juice of 1 lemon
a little olive oil
1
To make the satay sauce, whizz the peanut butter, chilli, soy, lemon juice and olive oil [...]
Shiitake Mushrooms and Cream
Shiitake mushrooms were the first mushrooms I came across that were anything more than the regulars you get in every fruit shop. Treat them gently.
There are pine mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms and oyster mushrooms, and lately we’ve seen varieties such as enoki, wood-ears and even fresh black truffles. Few of us can afford truffles, but these [...]
Pasta With A Sauce Like Tapenade
Anchovies and olives and things like that… Strong flavours means don’t go overboard. This is a dish in which all sorts of flavours pop out at you, like spooks in a ghost train. For those who eat and sleep food, you will note this recipe is no more than deconstructed tapenade. Take a tick.
1 onion, [...]