Headline: jacket potato gives hug on difficult day

To left: don't roasting things cheer you along? In the picture: large chunks of squash being roasted with a splash of olive oil and some black pepper at the house of Mrs Pat Jones: aka one of my marvellous aunts who cooks and totally ROCKS. Having no mother in my adulthood, these girls are very important. As is their cooking. But I digress, because I'm blathering and you might want to know what to do for your tea.

Right: take as many jacket potatoes as you think you can eat, rinse them, pat dry carefully and then massage them with sea salt. Put them into a hot oven and cook for about 30 minutes, possible more. The sea salt should have crisped up the skin and, inside, the potato will be soft and fluffy. Now, after about twenty minutes of potato cooking time, put into the oven (in a baking dish) a big handful of cherry tomatoes, a whole fresh green chilli, chopped as you might like,  it plus a sliced medium onion. Make sure you have put a good tablespoon of olive oil in with the vegetables.

So, take out the potatoes when they are done, cut into them, add a dab of butter if you like and then pile the tomatoes, onions and chilli on top.

That's it. Simple but manages to be quite luxurious and a sort of hands off sort of dinner. In fact, what I just cooked for myself just now while answering reproachful-sounding '"ring me" messages and attending to children .

Let me talk you through a couple of days of food ---feasting and observations.

Now Thursday was my birthday. I am not telling you how old I was, save to say that I have more energy now --and of a sustained and, well, productive sort than I did when I was eighteen. Read on. Lunch was a superlative jacket potato -- as follows. I cooked this just for me because, while I had been wined and dined ant breakfast and elevenses (well, hot chocolated), I wanted time alone. I know not everyone wants this, but, for me, it's nice to dine alone.

Right the potato served one, everything else two BUT with copious leftovers because, as you'll see, I cooked double. Give it a try?

First: your best jacket potato.

Take a good sized jacket potato. A proper floury job. Having pre-heated your oven to 200, rinse the potato gently and then pat it dry. Now, massage it liberally with some Maldon sea salt and stick it in the oven. That's the secret to the best jacket potato you will ever have eaten. When it's done, you will find that the skin is delectably crisp and the inside fluffy.

I've told you before of the habit in my household, copied some years ago from Nigel Slater, of attacking the potato with a neat karate chop. Try it. Some people --my husband now included-- do say that it ensures am appealing and not too neat potato. Anyway, now put in a little butter and some grated mature cheddar and then -- keep your eyes peeled this time of year-- any ittle green shoots you may find in your garden or someone else's. Or round and about, but know what and where you are picking. In my case, this consisted of some tiny sorrel leaves just pushing up, some little mint leaves (ditto) and some wild onions. You will see them here, there and everywhere. They look like chives and grow in abundance, I notice, in my nearest churchyard. But no foraging there. All the green shoots were finely chopped and added to the cheese.

See how simple this is and how it will make you happy?

Now, birthday dinner postponed until next week (suhsi -- I'm afraid I go into a sort of feeding frenzy and end up with teetering plates), here is what we had instead.

Superlative chicken and spinach curry in the oven. All you do is this.

Take as many free range chicken thighs (boned or not: mine are invariably on the bone) as you and a beloved might eat and put them into a nice big oven dish, having pre-heated the oven to around 200. Now, add a tablespoon of ground coriander, two of ground cumin, half a tablespoon of turmeric, five or six unpeeled cloves of garlic, a slosh of sunflower oil if the chicken is skinned (mine happened to be, that day), ten cherry tomatoes, a teaspoon or two of red chilli flakes, a fat pinch of asafoetida (which isn't essential, but it does give this a sort of musky, savoury depth) and five or six pieces of chopped, frozen spinach. Mix this all up well, add a little salt and pepper and just shove it in the oven. You will need to watch it closely to begin with, stirring it carefully as the spinach melts into the spices. Then you can leave it to do its thing for a good forty five minutes. At this point, it's done and you will have sweetly spiced chicken and you can squeeze out the lovely golden paste from the whole garlic cloves into your dinner. We had this with...


A straightforward Masoor (red lentil) dhal.

I took --let's say-- four tea cups of red lentils and added a couple of teaspoons of turmeric to them. Then, I covered them with water, plus almost as much water in volume again and brought them to the boil. Simmer very gently for about thirty minutes --really, you should skim off any froth that accumulates on the surface-- and then it should be done. I know it's traditional to simmer for a bit more, but for me, this is about right.

Now, you want to do what in South Indian cooking would be the tempering. In a frying pan, heat up some sunflower oil. Just a shallow film. To this, add a dessertspoon of brown mustard seeds. Hear them pop, and then add the same of whole cumin seeds and --because I fancied it-- onion seed (that is, Nigella seed or kalonji). Fry these off gently and just add them to the dhal with the oil. Mix in gently, check for salt  --which I always add at the end-- and serve with the chicken.

Also...spiced roast potatoes in the oven (can you improve on my word order here?)

Take, say, six medium potatoes, scrub but don't bother to peel. Make sure they are dry, though. Just put them into hot oil and sprinkle in teaspoons of dried red chilli flakes and cumin seeds and, if you like, a little turmeric. Sea salt, too. Cook them at about 200 for about 40 minutes. If you like, mix them with fresh coriander leaf, finely chopped, at the end. I also added some whole cloves of garlic, unpeeled, which I tend to munch whole.

Now, that chicken....did I mention that I cooked enough for two days? I often cook for an anticipated predicament the following day. This time, I was prescient -- and this thankful for the chicken. Here is what I did.

Chicken curry even better the next day, isn't it? (For Uncle Jamall xx)

So, you gently re-heat the chicken with some extra spinach in the oven and make sure you have added plenty of freshly-ground black pepper. While you are doing this, you can make a wonderful potato salad with Indian spices. In Northern India you might have this as aloo achaar -- a tart potato salad served as snack food. Splendid. So, boil four large potatoes with a dessertspoon of turmeric (and water, obviously) and, when done, slip off their peel and cut them into little cubes. Cool (you can make this a little ahead) or rinse gently under cold water and allow to dry. Now, snip five or so spring onions into little pieces and cut up a handful of cherry tomaties and a fat chunk of cucumber into tiny bits, too. Or, well, little pieces, because fiddly chopping might put you off when you just cannot be bothered at dinner time. Mix this in with the potato along with a teaspoon of cumin seeds, sea salt and pepper to taste and a couple of pinches of 'chaat' powder. Other possibilities, as you may well not have this addictive seasoning for snack foods knocking about the house: lemon juice, a little vinegar, green mango powder (amchoor --easier to get than you think) or anardhana --pomegranate powder. Tart and fragrant.

So, you serve the chicken with this cold and spicy salad and that's that.

But I'm not done yet. Oh no. Aha! I also made double of the potato salad. The cucmber and tomato could, I thought, just about handle it. And it did this. How clever of it.

Breakfast for a king (or Mehta, or Maharajah, or  our Uncle Mansoor in Karachi....)

Take a chapati or a pitta bread and warm it through. Stuff each bread you have with grated cheese and some of this superlative potato mixture. Really, you should have brought the salad to room temperature, I think. Dollop of decent pickle. I mean, a fragrant and slightly oliagenous mango or lime pickle, not a syrupy number.

And then for lunch or dinner...OH LOOK! I'm roasting another chicken! When it's cooked, tear up the breast meat and serve it as a salad with the rest of the potato salad, a little Greek yoghurt and some finely minced carrots. Here, a little Indian pickle added to the Greek yoghurt adds piquancy.

Fudco: tends to be my spice company of choice. Here we have turmeric in a nice big bag.

The happiness associated with roast vegetables

Now, we had the full roast chicken dinner tonight, but I won't bore you with the chicken part of this because, I realise, I'm forever giving you recipes for roast chicken. So...I'll focus on the roast potatoes and parsnips and say that I'd be happy to have them all on their own, or with all kinds of other dishes. I'm speaking of potatoes roasted with whole garlic cloves and parsnips --roasted in a separate dish.

You could serve your parsnips and potatoes with a simple omelette, or with a pie of some sort --cold or hot - to cheer up some cold meat or to eat with some cheese. Sometime, I'll even cook a big dish of roast potatoes to have with salad and cheese. I favour them with Wensleydale or Cheshire cheese, perhaps.

Anyway, to make excellent roast potatoes, you should really peel and parboil. Take them to the point when their edges are roughened up, but their centre is still firm, then drain and give them a good shake. Then into hot fat and cook in a hot oven for forty to forty five minutes, perhaps shaking them once. Your fat of choice might be sunflower oil or another bland oil or perhaps some dripping if you have roasted a joint. Or, best of all, goose fat. Tonight --as with the parsnips that follow-- I cooked them in the fat and juices from the chicken when it was about three quarters cooked.

You could be really lazy about it and just give the spuds a good clean, don't bother to peel and then do the same. They would still be delicious but not, I think, ever quite so sublime. When I add garlic, it may be peeled but more often than not I just throw in whole unpeeled cloves. You can squeeze out that golden paste when all is done or just pick them up and eat them, skin and all. They will be sticky and sweet.

Now those parsnips. Here, you cannot get away without peeling. Another thing is that you need to try and avoid the really huge ones because they may be inclined to get a bit woody. Some people core them; I never bother, unless they are really ancient and I have forgotten about them. So, top and tail, cut them in half and just slide them straight into hot fat. Some recipes add honey. I feel that parsnips are so naturally sweet (there was a reason why they were substituted for bananas in recipes of wartime Britain and its subseqent period of austerity), that any sweetening is guilding the lily.

So, cook the parsnips, turning once, for about half an hour and then out they come. They will be burnished and quite sticky and caramelised at the edges and I will always eat one before the dish gets to the table!

By the way, for the best evocation of the joys of the roast potato, you might want to look at Nigel Slater's writing. I also just read his description in Easy Living Magazine of happiness being that last roast potato. I concur.

http://www.nigelslater.com/home.asp 

http://www.easylivingmagazine.com/

The rest of our dinner happened to be a roast chicken, which tonight I had stuffed with a sage and onion stuffing, carrots, broccoli and no gravy. We just poured the remainder of the chicken's juices over our potatoes. As I've said before, if you roast your chicken properly --I always say breast down for at least the first half hour-- you don't need anything to moisten it.

BUT I would have been happy with the potatoes and their friendly cloves of garlic plus the parsnips, salt and pepper and a little English mustard.

Thanks to Alexbrn over at Flickr for the photo. Wish I had time to photograph everything I cooked!

It's the small things that count

O.K. It's a tough day today so far. You know, slept badly, worried about one of the children, fretting about my capacity as a mother. Hell, that's just the start. But what am I doing? There isn't enough worry to go round. Everyone has tough times so here are a few ideas for some small but significant details when you need a little comfort.

1. Coffee. At my right side, there is a melamine mug. I've picked it, tatty as it is, because it reminds me of camping trips in Wales and hikes up mountains. In it, some good coffee, a spoon and --this is the special bit-- a chunk of honeycomb, which was a well judged birthday present from a friend.
2. On your own, sit at the table with a plate you like and, if possible, something you don't usually get the opportunity to cook for yourself. This works well if you are alone at home, but, in my experience, also translates into a packed lunch if you put something a bit decadent in there. What that is will be up to you. I am going to do this at lunch today. What am I having? Follow the recipe later in this post: pasta with a lot of strong flavour.
3. Hot milk at bedtime. Slug of brandy or whisky, honey, grating of nutmeg or, if you have it, a sprinkle of cinnamon -- maybe even a cinnamon quill to stir your milk with. This is my plan for tonight.
4. If you have a suggestion for food to cheer and comfort,  then let me have it as a comment! But here are some classic cheer up foods in my house: I'll include just savoury foods for now, as my tooth is always more salt than savoury. And I mention below only what I'd knock up for myself in straitened times.

*A jacket potato with butter and cheese.Make sure you massage the potato with sea salt first, though. Then you'll get a wonderfully crisp jacket. You can always shake off the extra salt.

*A big bowl of pasta -- but it has to be spaghetti or linguine. I don't know why, but the other shapes do not seem to work in the same way for me. And it has to be a gutsy sauce. Even a cold sauce -- or just cold ingredients added (this doesn't sound too good: see below!).

*A bowl of prawns, hot with garlic and chilli. No cutlery. Ideally, they will have their shell on, so just suck away at them. Ain't no-one else to see you get in a mess. Bread after for starch?

*Couscous, cooked with a little Marigold Bouillon. I'd then just add a little extra virgin olive oil and drizzle on some Encona chilli sauce.

*A shepherd's pie. If I am making one for the family, I have been known to make a little one just for me and stash it to one side. I'll give you a recipe for this in a later post. It's not decadent, it's taking care of yourself (which I regularly fail to do, by the way -- lest you actually thought I was a high-achieving Domestic Goddess).

*Tomatoes or mushrooms on toast. Roast the tomatoes in the oven in olive oil and pile them on to toast. Fry mushrooms gently in butter and do the same. Sardines?  Make sure they are well peppered and that your toast is crisp under them. Maybe slightly charred at the edges?

Now, back to the big dish of spaghetti I promised. Just get as much spaghetti or linguine as you think you will eat. Put it on to cook in masses of boiling water. Now, finely chop several cherry tomatoes or just the last of the English tomatoes you have (I'm using the last few my children grew), half a red chilli and  three cloves of garlic. Put them in a bowl and add to them a dessertspoon of rinsed capers and the same of olives --whichever sort you fancy. When your pasta is cooked, drain it and reserve just a tiny amount of the cooking water in the pan. Now add lots of extra virgin olive oil, freshly-ground black pepper and the mixture in the bowl: it's cold on hot. Check for salt and shovel down the lot. I don't mind if you are watching Murder She Wrote and that you're in bed while so doing. But today, I shall be at table, with Radio 4 on and a book to one side. Today that book happens to be .....haven't decided yet. 

This works for me. Don't baulk at the raw garlic. It's health giving, don't you know.

Photo from pingu1963. www.flickr.com Thank you!