Cheat's moussaka

My love of Greek food is limitless and moussaka is one of my favourite comfort foods, especially in winter. There's a passing resemblance to lasagne, with its layers of meat, bechamel sauce and cheesy topping, and the pasta replaced with aubergine and potato.

Like lasagne, it's fiddly to assemble if you go down the traditional route and make a bechamel - something I'd only bother with if cooking for friends. This cheat's version substitutes the bechamel with yoghurt and crème fraiche. I also don't bother to fry or grill the aubergine slices first, but layer them straight in uncooked.

Enough for two portions, so you can freeze one (or it'll keep in the fridge for up three days).

What you need: 
300g minced lamb
1 onion, diced
Olive oil
2 tomatoes, finely chopped
1 dsp tomato purée
Glass of red wine
Oregano
Salt, pepper
Small aubergine, thinly sliced
Medium potato, peeled and very thinly sliced
Greek yoghurt / crème fraiche
Feta or Parmesan cheese
Breadcrumbs (optional)

What to do:
Sauté the onion in a glug of olive oil over a medium heat for about 10 minutes until soft and translucent. Turn up the heat, add the lamb and fry it until it's browned. Add the tomatoes, tomato purée, wine and oregano. Turn the heat down and simmer for 30 minutes. Season to taste.

To assemble the moussaka, put a layer of potatoes in the bottom of two individual-size pie dishes. Put a layer of aubergine on top. Add the lamb, then another layer of aubergine and spoon over enough yoghurt to cover. Finish with a layer of potato. Cover each moussaka with a couple of spoonfuls of the creme fraiche, then sprinkle over a little crumbled feta or finely grated Parmesan cheese. You can layer on some breadcrumbs before the cheese, as some Greeks do. Bake for an hour at 180C until the potatoes are tender enough to put a knife through.

Cook's tips:
Make sure you slice the potatoes as thinly as possible - they should be almost translucent. If they are too thick, they will take too long to cook through and everything else will be overcooked and possibly burned by then.

To make the honeyed thyme carrots in the photo, cut the carrots into batons, put in an ovenproof dish, then add a small amount of olive oil a generous drizzle of runny honey, a pinch of dried thyme (or some fresh leaves stripped off the stalks if you have some) and some seasoning. Bake alongside the moussaka for about 45 minutes. Sometimes I make khoriatiki if I fancy a salad instead.

Parmesan roasted chicory

Chicory is very underrated. We don't eat much of it here and it mostly seems to get sliced into salads. Its slightly bitter taste may be a reason for its unpopularity - across the Channel it's eaten widely and braising or roasting it mellows the bitterness and wilts the leaves into a soft, lush heap.

This very simple dish has only three ingredients and is surprisingly filling. I usually make it as a standalone meal but if I'm really hungry I'll grill a lamb chop to accompany.

What you need:
2-3 chicory heads
Olive oil
About 1 tbsp grated Parmesan

What to do:
Heat the oven to 180C. Halve the chicory heads lengthways and put cut side up in an oven dish. Drizzle over a little oil and season lightly. Cover with tin foil or a lid and bake for 30 minutes.

Take it out of the oven and remove the foil. Sprinkle over the Parmesan and return to the oven uncovered for another 30-40 minutes until the chicory has caramelised round the edges and the cheese has formed a crispy golden crust.

Cook's tips:
Make sure the chicory, either white or red, is super-fresh. Once it's on the turn it becomes more bitter. 

For a more substantial meal, you can add some chopped bacon or lardons before you put the Parmesan on. You can gratinée it by mixing the cheese with breadcrumbs.

You can roast fennel this way too - use 2 small bulbs halved or 1 large one quartered. Fennel is a natural partner for pork and good quality sausages are a good match here - you can roast them in the dish with the fennel once the foil is off.

Orzo risotto with porcini

Orzo is a kind of pasta that looks like tiny grains of rice - it's often used to bulk out soups (it works well in minestrone, for example) or make the base of a salad. It's rare to see it in supermarkets, but if you find a bag somewhere grab it as it's a versatile store-cupboard staple and a 500g pack will last for ages. I found my most recent bag in a discount supermarket some months ago and paid about £1.20.

Because orzo looks like rice, it's a good substitute for it in some dishes and it makes a great "risotto". It takes about half the time to cook, so you don't want the pasta in the pan for more than about 10 minutes.

What you need:
Orzo, about half a mug full
Small handful of dried porcini
4-5 sundried tomatoes
1/2 litre of stock
1 small onion, finely chopped
Olive oil
Seasoning
Parmesan cheese

What to do: 
Using separate bowls, soak the porcini and tomatoes by covering with boiling water and leaving for 15-20 minutes (or according to packet instructions). Drain, reserving the liquid. Make up the liquid to the right amount by topping up with boiling water and adding in a little stock powder if you wish. Chop the sundried tomatoes into small pieces.

Sauté the onion in the olive oil until it's soft and translucent, using a heavy-based sauteuse over a medium heat. Toss in the orzo, stir through until it's coated in oil (as you would for a rice risotto), then pour in about half the liquid. Bring the pan almost to the boil then turn the heat right down so everything's on a gentle simmer.

Stir the risotto and add the tomatoes and porcini after 5 minutes. Stir again and add more liquid if it starts to dry out. The orzo should cook within 10 minutes but check it - it needs to be al dente, not mushy. Stir in some grated parmesan, season to taste and dish up.

Cook's tips:
Be really careful with the cooking time. Risotto rice needs 20-25 minutes, orzo much less, so get all your ingredients ready before you switch the hob on. Orzo also needs a lot less liquid than rice as it is much less absorbent, so you need to watch how much you add and only top up it little by little.

A chicken risotto

I've had one of those weeks where I've done very little cooking - there were a couple of evenings spent in the pub that saw me raiding the fridge for snacks at 11pm after drinking beer on an empty stomach. Then I got ill - too ill to cook - and ended up ordering Chinese takeaway to be delivered one night. And yesterday I just felt too lazy - the curse of the lone cook - and ate a pastrami sandwich and a slab of halloumi while parked on the sofa watching Nigel Slater doing infinitely more interesting things with food than I was.

Foodwise, from a health point of view it was not a great week - I didn't eat nearly enough fruit and veg, despite my best intentions. And drinking generally leads to cravings for fat and salt when the hunger pangs kick in, which is why I was picking at cold cuts and cheese before bedtime.

But before my chaotic week got properly underway, I did actually do some real cooking. I still had some leftover chicken in the fridge from the roast of a few days previously, plus a lovely bowlful of homemade chicken stock that had set to a deep golden, thick jelly. There was only thing on my mind - risotto.

Risotto is one of my favourite comfort foods - it's fairly easy to make although it does require attention (I find the stirring very relaxing as there's a lovely rhythm to it), and it's also a very good way of using up leftovers. This chicken risotto is one I invariably make after roasting a chicken. It's not dissimilar to the classic Venetian risi e bisi, although I don't like my rice quite as sloppy. I've been cooking this so long (decades), I have no idea where my recipe came from originally - most likely, my usual habit of seeing what food I had in the house and slinging it together. The quantities given make one very generous bowlful.

What you need: 
A handful of cooked chicken, torn into strips or chunks
A small onion, finely chopped
About 1/2 litre/1 pint of chicken stock
A glass of white wine or vermouth (optional)
Half a punnet of chestnut mushrooms, halved then sliced
Half a mugful of risotto rice
Half a mugful of defrosted frozen peas
A lump of parmesan cheese, grated
A few chopped sprigs of parsley

What to do:
An hour before you start, take the stock out of the fridge, skim any fat off it and let it come to room temperature to soften the jelly. Heat a little olive oil over a low heat in a heavy based sauteuse and gently fry the onion until it is translucent. Turn up the heat and tip in the rice, stirring it through with a wooden spoon until every grain is coated in the oil and it's "fried" a little. If you're using the wine, now is the time to add it to the pan - it will sizzle alarmingly and create a lot of steam. Stir it furiously with the wooden spoon. No wine? Use a ladleful of the stock.

Turn the heat down to moderate, keep the pan on simmer and keep stirring until all the wine or stock has been absorbed. Then keep adding the stock, a ladleful at a time. And keep stirring - the process helps release the starches from the rice grains to produce that lovely creamy texture. The whole process should take around 20-25 minutes.

About halfway through, add the mushrooms. Don't be scared by how much space they take up in the pan - they will shrink right down as they cook. Five minutes later, add the peas and the chicken. Cook for another five minutes or so, until all the stock has been absorbed and the rice is thickly creamy. Turn off the heat, stir in the grated Parmesan and serve, with the chopped parsley as a garnish.

Cook's tips:
Purists insist the stock should be hot before adding it but I rarely bother to tip it into a saucepan and bring it to the boil. As long as the heat under the sauteuse is just high enough to keep the risotto on simmer, it'll still work just fine. It's important to take the stock out of the fridge though - you do not want to be adding really cold stock to the pan otherwise the temperature of the risotto will fluctuate too much during the cooking. I usually boil a kettle before I start cooking in case I don't have enough stock and also because sometimes the rice may be more absorbent than others.

The rice - it's really important to have the right kind of rice, starchy and capable of absorbing a lot of liquid. The three main Italian risotto rices are Arborio, Carnaroli and Vialone and you can find at least the first two varieties in the supermarkets. Using basmati or American long grain just won't work. Spanish paella rice makes a good substitute if you can't find risotto rice.

The cheese - like the rice, the right kind of cheese is essential. Parmesan is the ideal and easy to find in supermarkets. Do not use those nasty drums of grated Parmesan dust though - the contents both smell and taste like vomit, not the effect you want to achieve. Good substitutes for Parmesan are Grana Padano, which comes from the same region but is a cheaper generic version, much like cheddars, but otherwise almost (not quite!) indistinguishable, or Pecorino, which is made in Sardinia from sheep's milk but has a similar texture.