Steak and chips for one

There's something about steak that frightens people a lot about cooking it at home. It's actually not that hard to get it right with only a little practice, but I'd bet many people are scared of potentially ruining what could be quite an expensive slab of meat and instead settle for enjoying it in a restaurant instead. 

In the absence of doing a roast for several people, or making a nifty substitute, a piece of quality of steak for your Sunday supper, with homemade chips, is a lovely treat. I think it's well worth handing a fiver over for it once in a while, and that's certainly cheaper than on a restaurant menu. You don't have to buy organic but it's a good idea to buy the best you can afford. Instead of chips, I make wedges as I don't have a deep fryer but you could always resort to frozen oven chips if you're feeling very lazy (as I do sometimes).

What you need: 
Steak
Potatoes - as many as you need for your hunger
Olive or vegetable oil
Seasoning

What to do: 
Make the wedges first. Heat the oven to 200C. Cut the unpeeled potatoes into wedges and put in a bowl. Pour in a glug of oil - enough to coat them liberally - and toss them well. Season with a little salt and pepper and spread them out in a roasting tin. Bake for about 35 minutes, turning them halfway through, until they are golden and crispy.

As soon as the potatoes are in the oven, take the steak out of the fridge and put it on a plate. Rub it with olive oil and set aside so it can come to room temperature. 10 minutes before the potatoes are ready, heat a ridged cast iron griddle pan on the hob. Get it as hot as you can - you should be able to feel the heat with your hand at least 6 inches above it. Put the steak on and grill it for 2-3 minutes. Turn it with a pair of tongs - the meat should lift up easily. If it doesn't it still needs sealing so give it another 30 seconds or so. Grill for another 2-3 minutes on the other side. Take the pan off the heat and let the steak rest for a couple of minutes before dishing up.

Cook's tips: 
How to tell when your steak is ready - after the steak has had 2 minutes on the other side, press your fingers onto the meat. A rare, bloody steak will feel very soft. For medium rare, the flesh should spring back up quickly. If the meat is well done, it will feel almost rigid. There's no hard and fast rule, as much depends on the cut of meat and its thickness. This is why the finger test matters - giving the steak a prod is more reliable than using a timer. (My 2-3 minutes a side above is about right for a piece about 2cm thick (a little less than inch) with some fat on the meat if you like it medium rare, as I do.)

Choosing a cut is down to preference. Rib eye, rump and sirloin all have fat on them, which adds plenty of flavour and stops the meat drying out. Fillet steak, the most tender cut, has no fat so oiling it in advance is even more essential.

When to season - I prefer not to season my steak until it's on the plate with the chips. If you're going to season it raw, do it just before you slap it on the griddle. Any sooner and the salt will draw all the juice out of the meat, leaving you with a piece of tough shoe leather for dinner.

On the side, I'll either make a mixed leaf salad with tomatoes or cook some seasonal vegetables. To accompany the steak I like a good dollop of horseradish sauce or a little Dijon mustard.

Smoky roast belly pork with butternut squash

I just love belly pork. It's one of the tastiest cuts off the pig, it's incredibly versatile and it's dirt cheap, which is good news if you're a gourmet on a budget. I'm not but the cheaper cuts are often the most interesting. Belly pork has a wonderfully rich flavour that can handle the addition of lots of spices or herbs, but is equally good unadorned except for a seasoning of salt and pepper. The contrast between the meat and the creamy fat is also deeply pleasing on the palate, both when it's crisped to a golden hue or is still a wobbly white underneath.

If I'm cooking for friends, a 1kg slab of belly pork from the butcher will feed 4 easily, as well as providing crackling. Otherwise, I'll seek out slices - two will feed one person to the point of feeling stuffed. Supermarkets often sell packs of four slices for £2-3, a bargain. I'll cook half and freeze half for another day if I pick up one of these.

I like to roast the slices, especially on a weekend as there's more time to devote to making something special and it makes a good Sunday roast for one. I usually bake a butternut squash alongside the pork - I like the contrast of the squash's sweetness with the richness of the meat.

Two days ago, I also raided my local Asian store for fruit and veg - I love this shop as it's so much cheaper than the supermarkets and it stocks a really good range of the more exotic, unsurprisingly. I came home with four figs and three pomegranates that cost me just £2 for these, alongside some staples such as onions and parsley. Pomegranates are delicious in a salad so I rustled up a cooling side dish for the spicy belly pork.

What you need:
2 slices of belly pork
A butternut squash
Smoked paprika powder
A little chilli-flavoured oil
1 pomegranate
I small cucumber
A little sumac
Olive and lemon juice
Sea salt

What to do:
A couple of hours before you're ready to start cooking, rub the belly pork generously all over with the smoked paprika and set aside.

Deseed the pomegranate. This is really worth learning to do properly as cutting right into the fruit tends to spray the juice everywhere and it will stain everything it touches. It's a little fiddly but once you've got the hang of it, it only takes 10 minutes to get the seeds out. Fill a bowl with cold water and carefully slice the crown off the pomegranate with a sharp knife. Score through the rind at intervals from top to bottom, being careful to cut into the pith but not the seeds. Turn it upside down and leave to soak in the bowl of water for about 15 minutes. This softens the pith and internal membranes. Keeping your hands under the water, break through the skin and gently loosen the seeds from the pith, letting them fall to the bottom of the bowl. The membranes should float to the top - scoop out the debris with a spoon and discard then empty the seeds into a sieve and let them drain.

Heat the oven to 190C. Grind some sea salt over the belly pork slices and pop into a small roasting tin. Cut the squash in half and scoop out the seeds. Score both halves in a criss-cross pattern and brush with the chilli oil (if you don't have any, use olive oil and then sprinkle with the lightest dusting of smoked paprika). Put everything in the oven and leave for an hour, turning the pork after half an hour.

Ten minutes before you're ready to eat, make the cucumber and pomegranate salad. This recipe originates from Lebanon and usually contains mint and feta but that is too much alongside the meat here. This recipe strips it right back to the basics. If you can, use one of the small Middle Eastern type cucumbers - they are about 5-6 inches long and the flavour is more intense than our British variety.

Slice the cucumber in half and deseed it, by running a teaspoon down the length to scoop them out. Slice it thinly and put into a bowl. Add about a third of the pomegranate seeds (the rest will stay fresh in the fridge for 2-3 days). Sprinkle with a tiny pinch of sumac. Whisk together a very light dressing of around 3 parts olive oil to 1 part lemon juice. Dress the salad.

Cook's tips:
You won't find sumac in the supermarkets. Try a deli that stocks Middle Eastern foods or order it online. It's used widely across the Middle East so if you like to cook Lebanese or Persian dishes, it's worth tracking down. It has a slightly gritty texture and a light lemony taste. Mixed with plain yoghurt it makes a delicious marinade for chicken.You can substitute a little grated lemon or lime zest for the sumac in the salad.

If your belly pork has the skin on it, score it with a Stanley knife and rub lots of salt in to make crackling, being careful not to get any spice on it.

I usually find half a butternut squash is plenty with a salad alongside, unless I'm very hungry. I keep the other half back and make soup with it.

A roast chicken, French style

As I have previously mentioned, I'm rather fond of a roast but they are not usually a practical option if you live on your tod. As it happens, though, not only is roast chicken in my top 10 favourite meals, it's also the one that's worth making for yourself because the leftovers provide extra meals and you get a carcass to make stock with.

A small chicken weighing about a kilo is about the right size for one. If I can, I'll buy an organic bird, but even a non-organic free range chicken is preferable to a battery one. Most organic chickens tend to be on the large side because they are slaughtered later and thus have had more chance to grow into adulthood. They are undoubtedly the best for flavour so if you can find a smallish one buy it - the extra cost is well worth it for the taste.

I was briefly married to a Parisian many years ago - his mother was a fiercesome woman on first acquaintance but as I got to know her I discovered she was, in fact, a very warm-hearted soul and I became rather fond of her. She was also an absolutely amazing cook. Parisian Boy and I went often to the south suburbs for Sunday lunch with my in-laws, an occasion I always looked forward to knowing that my MiL would dish up some stunning grub - roast capon was a regular on her menu, for example. Once we'd become friends, and I was allowed to say tu to her, she passed on many recipes to me. These she would write down in that standard italic script taught to all French schoolchildren because the recipes were all in her head, passed on by her Auvergne forebears. If I was very lucky (not often), I'd be allowed to watch her in her kitchen.

So, the chicken. The typical British style of preparing a chicken for roasting is to smear it with softened butter and then fill the cavity with seasoning and stuffing. My former MiL's version is rather different and will pack even the blandest of birds with plenty of flavour.

What you need: 
A small chicken, about 1kg
Olive oil
Sea salt and black pepper
A quarter-lemon
1 shallot
2 cloves of garlic
A large bayleaf
Herbes de Provence

What to do:
Heat the oven to 190C. Cut off any trussing string from the chicken and remove any fat from the cavity. Peel the shallot and garlic, then stuff the cavity with these, the lemon quarter and the bayleaf. Oil the chicken outside with the olive oil - be generous with it. Grind some sea salt and black pepper over it then sprinkle liberally with the herbes de Provence. Chicken generally needs about 20 minutes per 500g, plus 20 minutes, but I often give it 30 minutes instead, turning the oven up to 200C for the last stretch as it crisps up the skin nicely. Don't forget to baste regularly.

Stay tuned for ideas for the leftovers and how to make stock.

Cook's tips:
I don't usually bother to make real gravy just for me - it's a lot of faff for one person. If I have a gravy craving I'll cheat with Bisto, making just enough in a coffee mug. Otherwise I'll have a dollop of onion marmalade on the side.

Proper herbes de Provence contain lavender, which is widely eaten in France. The fields of Provence are full of lavender, mainly grown for the perfume industry in Grasse, but much of it finds its way into sweets, ice-cream, chocolate and the herbal blend for which this province is famous. Supermarket blends routinely miss out the lavender. It's worth tracking down a supplier that sells an authentic mix, or to buy the separate ingredients from a herbalist and blend your own. The lavender should be about 10% of the whole.

To serve, I'll either have some greens such as kale or spring greens sautéed over a low heat for an hour, or I'll fill a second roasting tin with some potatoes, onion and peppers, and maybe some parsnip or carrot, toss them in olive oil and put them alongside the chicken for an hour.

A Sunday roast of sorts

The thing about living alone is that you can really miss a Sunday roast. There's something special about this British tradition of roasted meat, potatoes and vegetables, plus gravy and maybe stuffing, and followed with a proper pudding. Ideally accompanied by a bottle of good wine.

If I'm lucky, I'll be invited to a friend's for the roast, or we might meet at a restaurant so someone else gets to cook and wash up. Small as my house is, I try to invite people round once in a while for my own Sunday cooking even if it means eating off our laps on the sofa.

But even when I'm on my own, I still want something "roast-like" on a Sunday. Every few weeks I'll buy a small chicken because I can do lots of interesting things with the leftovers, including making stock from the carcass. If you don't have a joint, however, there are still things you can toss in the oven for an hour that almost replicate the meal. The following dish makes just enough for a generous portion.

What you need: 
3 good quality sausages
1 onion, peeled and cut into wedges
8-10 baby plum tomatoes
2-3 cloves of garlic
A handful of new potatoes (or old ones cut into small chunks)
Olive oil

What to do:
Heat the oven to 210C. Line a roasting tin with some foil then put all the ingredients in and drizzle generously with the olive oil. Turn everything with your hands until well coated. Season with sea salt and black pepper and tuck in a couple of bay leaves. Put in the oven for about an hour. I usually have a look about halfway through and turn things again with a wooden spatula to make sure everything browns evenly. It's ready when the house is full of wafting aromas and everything looks pleasingly sticky and just crispy round the edges.

Cook's tips: 
If you don't have sausages, use a couple of chicken thighs. You can use whatever vegetables you have to hand - peppers cut into quarters, chunks of butternut squash, carrots, parsnips and wedges of fennel are all good options. Don't leave out the potatoes though - it's these that help create the illusion of a Sunday roast.

Depending on the ingredients of the sausage, I might use a flavoured olive oil. I particularly like using a lemon-flavoured olive oil if I use chicken and then I'll also tuck in a couple of lemon quarters and bit more garlic. If you use half a ring of chorizo cut into chunks, you could use chilli oil to boost the spiciness.