Thai-style soup with glass noodles

I had a major craving for heat the other day. Not the sort where I pile on the woollies and sit with my back to the radiator, but heat in the form of chillies. I'm also haunted every time I open the larder by a huge pack of glass noodles that I bought several months ago and have yet to open. Something soupy and Eastern came to mind. Something that would make my tongue seriously tingle while nourishing me.

I needed to hit my local market anyway, to stock up on fresh fruit and vegetables so it was a matter of moments to add fresh chillies, lemongrass, coriander, a hand of ginger and a bag of limes to my basket.

This soup is quick to put together and makes a generous bowlful. The noodles make it surprisingly filling.

What you need:

1 tbsp homemade Thai spice paste
2-3 spring onions, sliced into small rounds
1 small carrot, sliced into matchsticks
A small handful green beans, top and tailed
12 baby button mushrooms
1 small packet jumbo prawns
Coconut milk (optional)
1 pint stock
Vegetable oil
Glass noodles, 1 twist

What to do: 

Make up the stock. Heat the oil in a deep pan and gently fry the spring onions until they start to soften. Add the spice paste and pour in the stock. Add the carrots, beans and mushrooms and simmer until just tender. Meanwhile dump the glass noodles in a heatproof basin and cover them with boiling water. Leave them for 10 minutes to soften. Add the prawns to the soup and simmer for 5 minutes. Check the seasoning - if it's too fiery temper it with a little coconut milk (there is already some in the spice paste). Drain the noodles well and put in the bottom of the soup bowl then ladle the soup over the top. 

Cook's tips: 
If you have fresh stock, great, but a chicken stock cube will do the job just as well or some vegetable stock powder. If you use bought stock, it will be saltier so check the seasoning as you go.

Glass noodles are easiest to find in Chinese supermarkets but sometimes turn up in Asian stores or even the big four supermarkets.

If you've no fresh spice paste, use a small tablespoonful from a jar of Thai red or green curry paste. You will need about half a can of coconut milk, in that case, and possibly less stock.   

Game soup

An excellent way to use up leftover pheasant or other game birds. This makes a very filling and hearty soup that is just the ticket in cold weather.

What you need:
Half a cooked pheasant
2 pints/1 litre of game stock
1 onion, finely diced
1 carrot, diced
About half a mugful of broth mix
A sprig of fresh thyme
Seasoning

What to do:
Strip the meat off the carcass and set aside. Make the stock.  

Sweat the onion in a little olive oil until it's translucent. Meantime, tip the broth mix into a sieve and rinse it well under the cold tap. Add the carrots to the pan and sweat for a couple of minutes then pour in the stock and add the broth mix plus the thyme. Simmer for an hour to an hour and a half until the grains and pulses are tender. Ten minutes before serving add the pheasant meat, chopped or torn into bite-sized pieces. Season to taste.

Cook's tips:
Broth mix, or soup mix, is a blend of pearl barley and dried pulses. The ingredients can vary but it usually contains red split lentils, yellow split peas and green split peas. Sometimes it contains marrowfat peas and other larger pulses too - if so, you will need to soak the mix overnight then drain and rinse well before cooking. Do not add salt until the end of the cooking process or the pulses will stay tough and hard.

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.

Stocking up

If I've roasted a chicken I like to get my money's worth out of it, especially if I've shelled out a tenner for an organic bird. Nothing gets wasted. Nothing.

I count on getting 4 meals out of a 1kg chicken. That's a portion of hot roast meat, plus plenty of leftovers to do interesting things with (more on that another day). And then there's the carcass.

For me, a chicken is always good value for money not just because of the number of meals I can make for myself but because I get to make real stock. Forget stock cubes - they are nasty, mass-produced lumps of grit that when dissolved produce a bland but over-salty liquid. The only bought stock in my larder is Marigold vegetable bouillon, which is very good quality. But for meat stock, it must be home-made.

Home-made chicken stock is both sublime and versatile. Properly brewed, it makes a flavoursome base for soups, risottos, stews and casseroles.

What you need: 
A chicken carcass
Herbs
Assorted vegetables
A big pan
Water

What to do:
Strip the carcass of all the leftover meat and store it in the fridge. Boil a kettle full of water and then get some heat on the hob - put the roasting tin on and pour in a little boiling water, then stir and scrape with a wooden spatula to salvage all the leftover roasting juices and crusty bits from the bird. Pour carefully into the pan. Add the carcass - I usually stuff mine with lemon, garlic and shallots and these all go in the pan with the bones. A couple of bay leaves should join the mix. Depending what else I have in the house, I'll add a quartered onion, a carrot and a celery stalk, and possibly some fresh parsley. Add the rest of the hot water from the kettle and bring the pan to the boil.

What happens next depends on the pan you use. I like to use my pressure cooker as the intensity of the cooking process squeezes every last drop of goodness out of the ingredients - the bones especially will yield all their marrow this way. An hour in a pressure cooker should be enough. If you're using a regular pan, you'll need to keep it on a low simmer once it's come to the boil and put a tight-fitting lid on.This method needs at least 2 hours, preferably 3, and you'll need to check the water level regularly and top up if necessary - you don't want your stock boiling dry. Don't add too much water though - you want a stock rich enough to set to a jelly when cooled, not a dilute, watery one.

When it's ready, turn off the heat and strain through a sieve into a heatproof bowl or jug and let it cool.

Cook's tips: 
You should have about a litre or so of stock - depending on your plans for it, you might want to freeze half. Otherwise put it in the fridge, where it should set to a thick jelly and keep for about 3-4 days.

You can add pretty much whatever raw ingredients you want to the stock before you start cooking. An onion and a bay leaf is the bare minimum to accompany the bones but don't add too many different things - you want the stock to taste of chicken, enhanced with the herbs, onion and a couple of other veg, not overwhelmed by the entire contents of your larder. Be careful about over-seasoning it, particularly if you add the skin from the chicken (unlikely in my house as I love the roasted skin - it's the best bit, in my opinion).