Quick chicken supreme

My abiding memory of chicken supreme as a child is of the tinned variety - an unappealing glop of unidentifiable bits of poultry slathered in a white sauce akin to a well-known brand of chicken soup. Bland, unattractive and definitely unappetising.

The full-on version, while not necessarily complicated, is time-consuming to make - at the very least it involves making a white sauce from a roux and some versions have you simmering carrots in white wine for an hour to create a stock and then poach the chicken in it.

I'm not convinced it needs to be so difficult, especially when it's a great way to use up leftover chicken. This is ready within 15 minutes, perfect for a quick Sunday supper to eat off your lap in front of the TV. 

What you need: 
1 leftover chicken breast
1 small onion, chopped
2 generously heaped dessertspoons half-fat crème fraiche
Small handful fresh parsley
Butter
Seasoning

What to do:
Using a heavy sauteuse, sauté the onion in a little butter over a low to medium heat until it turns translucent and just starts to colour. While it's cooking, skin the chicken breast and cut into bite-sized chunks. Chop the parsley very finely. When the onions are ready, add the chicken and stir through the crème fraiche. Make sure everything is well mixed then add the parsley, season to taste and stir through again. Let it cook for 5 minutes or so until the chicken is fully reheated then plate up!

Cook's tips: 
I find it really helps to take the chicken out of the fridge half an hour beforehand, so it has time to come to room temperature, because it will reheat a lot faster.

For some bizarre reason, chicken supreme is traditionally served on a bed of white rice. To my mind this simply adds to its reputation for blandness. And I associate white food with convalescence, precisely because it's usually bland and thus unlikely to upset the tummy. Here, I simply sautéed some leftover potato from the evening before's roast for the carbs, and steamed some green beans to go on the side. You could team the supreme with fried wedges of polenta or some sweet potato mash.

Seasoning is critical for chicken supreme. Starting with a decent chicken helps (my butcher sold me a a very tasty small corn-fed bird at the weekend). But packing flavour into the sauce is what makes it. Plenty of black pepper, plus salt to taste and then whatever grabs you - substitute tarragon or dill for the parsley, sauté some garlic in with the onion, finish it with a tiny squeeze of fresh lemon juice...

Warm sugar-snap pea salad with pan-fried coley

What a relief that the hungry gap is well and truly behind us - my local market has more and more different fruits and veg appearing on the stalls every week, which is good as I feel like I spent most of March surviving on carrots, cabbage and potatoes, relieved only by bags of salad and packs of imported beans to get some much-needed variety onto my plate. Not all UK produce has been picked outside yet, but I was happy to find sugar-snap peas that had been grown under glass - tiny little pods, with the peas barely formed inside and deliciously sweet.

Sugar-snaps are a great ingredient for a warm salad. This one goes particularly well with fish. I've stopped buying cod because of the low stocks but coley is a really good alternative.

It's really important to get everything ready first because the fish and the vegetables will both quickly and be ready at the same time.

What you need: 
Coley fillet
Handful sugar-snap peas
Handful green beans
Small handful of rocket
1 and 1/2 tbsp walnut oil
1/2 tbsp raspberry vinegar
Butter
A little flour
Seasoning

What to do:
Make the salad dressing by whisking the walnut oil and raspberry vinegar together with a little salt and pepper. Tip some flour on a plate or chopping board and coat the fish with it. 

Top and tail the sugar-snaps and green beans. Bring them to the boil and cook for about 4-5 minutes until they are al dente. Drain, pop back in the pan to keep warn while the fish finishes cooking, stir through the rocket and dress.

While the peas and beans are cooking melt the butter in a frying pan and fry the coley fillet over a medium to high heat - it'll need about 3-4 minutes on each side, depending on thickness.

Cook's tips:
You can find walnut oil in most decent supermarkets. It's a bit pricey (a 250ml bottle costs around £2) but its strong flavour means you don't need much so it should last a while. If you don't have walnut oil use olive oil instead but the raspberry vinegar is essential as the fruity tones match the sweetness of the peas.

Larder larks no. 1

A combination of a foot fracture, a trip away for a dear departed friend's wake and a mountain of work - all in the past fortnight - have meant I've been surviving on a combination of dining out, ordering in takeaways and flinging together the quickest of quick meals in my tiny kitchen so as not to stand on my poor foot too long. Cooking's not very easy, anyway, when your dominant hand is more occupied with a walking stick...

However, I've not stopped thinking about food. Both the things I like to cook and eat and also the things I buy and store. The latter, particularly, have been on mind after I volunteered to take part in a food photography project.

I stumbled across @storecupboards some weeks ago on Twitter and was intrigued - this blog is a delicious combination of the owner's own culinary adventures and his nosiness. In short, he likes snooping in people's larders to see what they eat. I couldn't resist the challenge and promptly trotted off to photograph my own cupboards.

What's in my larder, then?

Lots, it would appear. Possibly too much. I must admit that listing almost everything I keep in my kitchen cupboards and fridge (but not the freezer) quite shocked me. It shocked others too - I had a lot of feedback on Twitter, mainly along the lines of "why do you have so much food? What are you going to do with it all?" In fairness, a lot of it is just ingredients - things you can cook with but not necessarily eat on their own. Plus, I'm a bit of an apocalypse hoarder - one of my parents grew up with wartime rationing and couldn't bear an empty pantry. That's clearly been passed on to me! Also, because I have a disability I have days when I'm simply too ill to cook, which is what the emergency soup tins are for. (And the fridge was over-crammed as I'd just done a shop.)

But it got me thinking and I resolved to use up much more of my larder contents. I've made a start on that already, finishing up two almost-empty jars of chutney and a packet or two of noodles.

I also decided I should write about some of the more exotic ingredients I've picked up on my travels. So here are a couple, in the first of an occasional series.

The pomegranate molasses came from a trip to Turkey a few years ago, when it was almost impossible to find outside London - I mainly use it to coat meat before roasting, but it also finds its way into dressings and dips occasionally. That's a half-litre bottle, by the way - a little goes a long way and I still have half a bottle left.

I found the citron confit on a shelf in a Parisian supermarket - oddly, because I'd never seen it during all the years I lived there. It's a thick paste made up of about 50% lemons and 25% ginger, the rest being oil, alcohol and salt, and it has a pleasingly sour and fiery taste. I use it to flavour chicken and fish or add to tagines. I love cooking with lemons - I get through several fresh ones a week, plus the north African preserved variety. When this jar (alas, almost empty now) is finished, I'm going to figure out how to make my own. Unless I can get back to Paris again soon, obviously.

The herb mix came from a shop in Bardolino, on the shore of Italy's Lake Garda. I forget all the ingredients as it came in a huge bag with a tag on it and had been made by a local producer. It contains parsley and chilli, and I think marjoram, and one other herb. I use it as intended - for stirring through pasta, with nothing else but olive oil to dress it.

Keen to discover more interesting things to eat, I signed up a couple of months ago to Larder Box, which for a modest fee posts a box of interesting British artisan foods to you every month. April's box (in the photo) contained a bottle of pontack, which I'd never heard of but is a deep, slightly spicy and quite sharp sort of vinegar made from elderberries. I've used it a fair bit already, mainly to marinate sticky ribs, and when it's gone I'll definitely be buying more. (The smoked cheese was consumed fairly quickly (!) with the chutney, the chipotle chillies are earning their keep and the parkin, incredibly, is almost untouched - stashed in a cake tin on top of the cupboards, for those days when only cake will do.) I'm now eagerly awaiting the next box, which promises to contain smoked sea salt and banana ketchup. See, I'm hooked already...

Chorizo meatballs with roasted tomatoes and wild rice

What's not to like about meatballs? They are so versatile - they go brilliantly with pasta and sauce, are delicious with mash and gravy and add meaty goodness to a soup. If you make your own you can use whatever you like in them - beef, lamb and pork, even chicken (delicious in Asian soups or noodle-based dishes). They are also very easy to make, but because of the quantities you need it's hard to make a tiny batch - better to just go with the flow and freeze the excess for another day.

This makes enough for 12 meatballs - 2 portions.

What you need: 
250g minced pork
About 30g chorizo sausage, finely diced
Fresh breadcrumbs
5 cloves of garlic
1/4tsp each of smoked paprika, cumin, chilli powder (chipotle)
Tomato purée
A pinch of dried oregano
1 tsp each fresh chopped parsley, coriander
Pinch of salt
About 50g wild rice
Cherry tomatoes

What to do:
Put the pork mince in a mixing bowl and add the salt, chorizo, 1 clove of very finely crushed garlic, spices and herbs plus about a tablespoon of tomato purée. Mix everything well together then add enough fresh breadcrumbs to bind everything together. Shape into 12 small meatballs and chill in the fridge for at least half an hour.

Bring a pan of unsalted water to the boil and add the wild rice. Once the water returns to the boil, turn it down to a simmer and cook for about 45 minutes.

Put the tomatoes into an ovenproof dish with 4 unpeeled cloves of garlic. Drizzle well with olive and season with sea salt and a little freshly ground black pepper. Bake in the oven at 200C for 30 minutes.

To cook the meatballs, heat some oil in a heavy frying pan or sauteuse and fry gently for around 10-12 minutes, turning regularly so they brown all over. Alternatively you can put them on a baking tray or in a shallow roasting tin and bake them for about 25 minutes in the oven (180C), turning them once.

Put the meatballs and tomatoes on a bed of rice and  drizzle over the juices from the dish you cooked the tomatoes in.

Cook's tips:
Add the breadcrumbs gradually - too much too soon and the mixture will be too dry and won't form meatballs properly. If this happens, add a little cold water to the mix.

To freeze the spare meatballs, put them on a plate or small tray first so they don't stick together. When they have frozen pop them into a freezer bag. Defrost overnight in the fridge.

The meatballs go well with rice and some seasonal veg. Alternatively, heat them through in some tomato sauce and serve on a bed of tagliatelle.

Wild rice isn't actually a rice but wild grass seeds. It needs a lot of cooking, like brown rice, and has a deep nutty taste. You should be able to find it in most supermarkets as well as specialist shops.

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.

Homemade duck confit

If I'm eating out and duck confit is on the menu, it's pretty much a given that I'll order it. It's irresistible, delicious and one of my favourite ways to consume meat. It can also be a bit pricey in restaurants, inexplicably so when the ingredients are cheap and preparation doesn't require lots of complex steps. It's simply meat poached gently in its own fat.

Of course, if you're in France on a break it's much cheaper to buy a tin or jar or two from a supermarket to bring home. The main disadvantage is the weight - if you're flying, lugging back confit will seriously affect your baggage allowance.

My advice is make it yourself. Duck legs are incredibly cheap - you can usually buy a pair from around £3.50-£4 in the bigger supermarkets. They sell at this price because the breast is in greater demand as a separate cut. As well as a frugal treat, confit is incredibly simple to make, but it does need time so it's probably best to do it on a weekend when you can be around to keep checking on it. This is how Parisian Boy's mother taught me to make it.

What you need: 
2 duck legs
White wine or white vermouth
Fresh thyme and bay leaves
2 cloves of garlic
2 heaped teaspoons of sea salt

What to do:
Check the skin on the duck and pull out any stray feather stumps. Chop the garlic roughly and tear the bay leaves into pieces. Make a layer of half the garlic, half the bay leaves and thyme sprigs and half the sea salt in a dish in which the legs will fit snugly. Put the legs on top, skin side up, and cover with more salt and the rest of the garlic and herbs. Cover with a lid or some clingfilm and pop it in the fridge for 24 hours.

Next day, brush off all the salt, garlic and herbs from the duck. If there's liquid in the bottom of the dish, discard it and pat the legs dry with kitchen paper if necessary. Place both the legs, skin side down, in a snug saucepan - they should fit as tightly as possible. Pour over a very generous glass of wine or vermouth - at least 150ml. Turn on the hob and bring the pan almost to the boil - as soon as it starts to bubble, turn the heat right down to the lowest setting and put a lid on the pan.

You can now leave it to poach for 2 hours. The fat should start to render fairly soon so check on it regularly - you don't want the fat bubbling over and catching fire. This shouldn't happen on such a low heat, of course, but you also don't want the meat cooking too fast so use a heat diffuser if you need to reduce the lowest setting a little further.

By the end, the meat should have shrunk back from the ankle and the skin should look thin rather than plump with fat. Take the pan off the heat and let the legs cool in the fat for 20 minutes. Once the fat is cool enough to handle safely, you can take the duck legs out of the pan.

To eat, reheat in the oven, skin side up, for about half an hour at 200C. The skin should crisp up nicely. 

Cook's tips: 
To store, pack one or both legs into a plastic or foil container or a wide-necked glass jar and cover with the fat. It'll stay fresh in the fridge for at least a month as long as it is completely submerged in fat. You can freeze the duck at this stage - defrost only in the fridge overnight, not in a microwave.

If you're like me, you'll want to eat one of them immediately, but the confit will stay fresh for a day in the fridge without submersion in its fat. Just pop it into an airtight container or cover it with clingfilm on a plate.

Don't throw away the fat - it's full of flavour and makes the best roast or sauté potatoes. If you make confit more than once, use the fat on subsequent occasions for the poaching - the vermouth brings flavour but is really there to kickstart the initial process. The fat will stay fresh indefinitely if you keep it in an airtight jar in the fridge. Sometimes enough liquid is released during the poaching that it will form a layer of jelly under the fat - you can use this to make gravy.

Green beans French-style

I love green beans a lot but my culinary repertoire with them was very limited until I went to live in France for years. In my youth, they were served up plain boiled, as a side dish. On a good day, they were tossed in a little butter. Very occasionally they turned up in a salad nicoise or a navarin. In short, fairly dull.

So - to France. Not long after my arrival, Parisian Boy dished them up this way for supper. It was a revelation and I've been cooking them this way ever since when I've used them as a side dish.

This recipe is simplicity itself. It takes almost no time to prepare and only 10-15 minutes to cook. It goes well with grilled chops or sausages and almost any kind of fish.

What you need: 
A portion of green beans
A couple of ripe tomatoes
A couple of cloves of garlic
Olive oil

What to do:
Slice the garlic thinly. Halve the tomatoes then cut each half into quarters (so you have 8 wedges per tomato). Heat a little olive oil in a heavy frying pan over a low to moderate heat. Tip the garlic and tomatoes together into the oil and stew them gently for about 10-15 minutes until the tomato is breaking down and the garlic has turned translucent.

Meanwhile, top and tail the green beans then put them on to boil. They are ready when they are al dente - about 5 minutes. Drain and set aside until the tomatoes and garlic are ready then toss them through, season to taste and dish up.

Cook's tips: 
It's important not to overheat the frying pan - the garlic especially needs to stew rather than fry - if it starts to caramelise it will add a bitter note to the other ingredients and at that stage it can turn burnt very quickly.

This is a great way to use up leftover vegetables. Overripe tomatoes that are past their best for anything else but not quite beyond use work well here as they will cook down quickly. If you already have some cooked green beans left over in the fridge all you'll need to do is warm them up in the pan with the tomatoes. Even uncooked green beans that are just starting to look a little limp and blotchy can be redeemed this way instead of binned.

Beetroot and broad bean risotto

Risotto is my go-to comfort food when I need something soothing and creamy and I have two standby favourites - my chicken and pea risotto and a broad bean and bacon recipe, which I think I borrowed from Nigel Slater back in the mists of time. But once in a while I'll ring the changes and shuffle the ingredients around. Springtime offers endless possibilities, with all the lovely new vegetables coming into season. Earlier this week, I came home from the market laden with tiny haricots verts, young turnips and beetroots, purple sprouting broccoli, a bunch of asparagus, two globe artichokes (the first I've seen this year) and fresh garlic.

Wednesday's supper was going to be based around the purple sprouting - it's one of my favourite vegetables and only in season for a very short time so I tend to eat a lot of it when it's around. But then there was a change of plan and it was risotto for tea instead.

This is very brightly coloured but has a light, creamy texture and a surprisingly delicate flavour. Suitably springlike, it also hits the spot while there's still a nip in the air as we ease towards Easter. 

What you need:
Half a mug of Arborio rice
1 onion, chopped
2 small cooked beetroot
A mug of broad beans
A pint of vegetable stock
Half a glass of vermouth
Olive oil
Crème fraiche
Fresh dill and chives, chopped
Parmesan cheese
Seasoning

What to do: 
Blanch the broad beans and skin them. Dice the beetroot finely.

Sauté the onion in the olive oil over a medium heat until it turns translucent. Slosh in the vermouth and stir well. When it's almost absorbed, start adding the stock - little by little, stirring well each time and making sure it's almost absorbed before adding more.Test the rice after 15 minutes; it should be al dente. When it's at this stage add the broad beans. Keep stirring for another 5 minutes and add more stock if you need to. Add the beetroot and stir through very carefully.

Take the pan off the heat, stir through a generous teaspoon of crème fraiche, a handful of grated fresh parmesan and the chopped herbs. Season to taste.

Cook's tips: 
As usual with beetroot, it's a good idea to wear protective gloves when handling it if you don't want to stain your hands red. Ready-cooked beetroot saves you an hour of preparation time - don't buy the sort in vinegar though.

The easiest way to chop a very small amount of herbs quickly and finely is to put them in a coffee mug and snip them with kitchen scissors.

If you use frozen broad beans, dump them in a heatproof basin and pour boiling water over them. The water will cool fairly quickly and the skins should just slip off.

Puff pizza pie

Pie again. In one of those surreal flights of daydreamery, I imagine a world in which the Talking Heads sing a song called "More Songs About Pies and Food" and I don't even like the Talking Heads...

Anyhoo, this hybrid is something I've been improvising for a long time and it's one I'm particularly likely to rustle up when I already have some leftover puff pastry in the fridge, because I wouldn't buy puff pastry especially for this, and am also feeling somewhat lazy. It is, as the name suggests, a sort of pastry version of a pizza or an open, flat pie. Not unlike those dinky little puff pastry tartlets recipe books suggest you can knock out as a canapé or starter, except this one's a fully grown adult. And with the below ingredients, it's not dissimilar to a flammekuche.

I also call this my deli pie because I'm most likely to assemble it with the sort of nice things you can buy in a deli for a plate of antipasti. And, if I'm honest, my fridge is full of such deli ingredients for precisely that purpose - the evenings when I'm too lazy to cook and just want to sit in front of the TV with a plate of cheese, ham, olives and gherkins.

What you need: 
1/4 pack puff pastry
2 slices of Serrano ham
Artichoke hearts
4-5 pitted black olives
8-10 capers
1 mozzarella
Creme fraiche
Black pepper
Olive oil

What to do: 
Heat the oven to 220C. Sprinkle a little flour onto the work top and roll out the pastry into a 15cm by 15cm (6 inches) square. About 1cm (1/2 inch) in from the edge, score gently all the way round with a sharp knife, being careful not to cut right through.

Smear the base of the pastry, inside the scoreline, with a teaspoon of crème fraiche. Tear the ham into strips and the mozzarella into small pieces. Scatter the ham over the pastry, keeping everything inside the scoreline. Top with the olives, capers and a 3 or 4 artichoke hearts from a jar. Finish with the mozzarella. Drizzle with a little olive oil and season. Brush the edge of the pastry with a little olive oil and bake for about 15-20 minutes until the mozzarella has melted and the pastry has puffed up to a golden rim round the edges.

This goes down well with a green salad on the side.

Cook's tips: 
Pastry likes cold, so keep it in the fridge until you're ready to use it and wash your hands under the cold tap before you start. 

I never buy frozen pastry - when you live alone, a standard 500g slab is far too big, but if you defrost one, you can't refreeze the leftovers to use another time. Buy it fresh. You can quarter it, use what you need then portion and wrap the rest separately in cling film and pop them in the freezer. Then you can just defrost what you need each time.

The beauty of this sort of pie is you can fill it with whatever you have to hand - a little leftover cooked chicken, goat cheese, finely sliced peppers... You could also smear the base of the pie with a little passata or tomato purée. To finish it, you could scatter over a few torn basil leaves, if you have them, or tiny dollops of pesto.

Lamb chops baked in the oven

I've been making this dish so long, a sort of one-portion hotpot, I have totally forgotten if it came from a recipe in a book or a magazine or if I just made it up to see what happened. It's a staple of my winter repertoire of warm, filling standards and it's pretty foolproof - it takes less than 10 minutes to assemble and then you can just pop it in the oven and leave it to do its thing, although it's not one for a week night if you're coming home from work and want food quickly.

It's also not a dish for warm weather so March/April is about the latest I trot this out until the weather cools in October and it's time for comfort food again.

What you need: 
A couple of lamb chops
1 large potato (or 2 medium), thinly sliced
1 onion, thinly sliced
1 large clove of garlic, thinly sliced
About 1/2 litre of stock
A little fresh rosemary
Olive oil
Butter
Seasoning

What to do: 
Heat a little oil and a small knob of butter in a frying pan. Fry the lamb chops until they are brown on both sides and set aside.

In the bottom of a small casserole dish, make a layer of half the potato slices, then cover it with a layer of half the onions and all the garlic. Sprinkle over the rosemary, and season. Put the lamb chops on top, then make another layer of onion and top it with the rest of the potato slices. Season the top of the potatoes.

Deglaze the frying pan with the stock then pour it into the casserole dish. It should be about 2/3 deep. Dot a little butter onto the top potato slices then put the dish in the oven for 90 minutes. Check it occasionally to make sure it's not drying out - top up with a little hot water if it is.

Cook's tips:
If you don't have lamb stock (fresh or from a cube), use vegetable stock. Any other meat stock will skew the flavours and you want the lamb to shine through. 

This benefits from some greens of some sort on the side to counteract the carbs. I like to dish up some green beans or a little braised savoy cabbage.