The Way Things Are

I could never really say what we actually eat from day to day. I'm not a great planner of meals. Most of the time I tend to just cook whatever happens to be to hand. Sometimes, though I'm organised and that's great.

Last night is a good example of The Way Things Are. I found a packet of prawns in the freezer. I didn't know they were there because Brian bought them. He does most of the supermarket shopping and I do most of the cooking which can lead to Old Mother Hubbard moments when there's nothing in the house except Marmite and bran flakes.

These prawns were the fat, juicy frozen uncooked type. What a find! I had some risotto rice and a head of broccoli, so it seemed to suggest a risotto.

I sweated off a finely chopped onion in a bit of butter, added the chopped broccoli with the tender parts of the stalk, and then a cupful of rice and let that lot toast and sweat in the butter for about five minutes.

Next I added a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and let the rice drink it up before adding a couple of mugfuls of hot chicken stock made from those lovely little Knorr Stockpots - dinky little pots of jellied stock without the powdery taste of previous fave Marigold bouillon.

Then I left it to cook. There is a school of thought that says you should hover over a risotto, stirring it lovingly and adding ladles of hot stock as the rice drinks it up. Then there's another school of thought which says bung the whole lot in at once. I belong to the latter.

Then the cat arrived among the pigeons - or rather the mobile fishmonger arrived and I'd not only forgotten he was coming, I'd also neglected to make sure I had the requisite cash to make a purchase. Granny in the Annexe took pity and procured me half a kilo of mussels. Perfect to add to my seafood risotto.

So I did, along with the prawns, a pinch of thyme and a bit more butter and very delicious it was too (I was told).

So that was The Way Things Were last night. Tonight's going to be much the same, except I haven't got a nice bag of prawns to discover any more.

There is, however, a rather charming lobster...

Halloween cupcakes

H7, no longer the teeniest Brownie in the pack, has decided it is time for her to do her cooking badge. This requires her to complete a number of cooking-related tasks and to understand that hands must be washed and that knives are sharp.

She has had to cook a healthy meal (leek and potato soup - her current signature dish) and some cakes or biscuits that she can take and share with her fellow Brownies.

Hence the Halloween cupcakes (yes, they're fairy cakes, but 'Halloween fairy cakes' sounded odd).

This is your usual run of the mill fairy cake recipe: two large eggs, a slosh of vanilla extract and 125g each of butter, caster sugar and self raising flour. H7 mixed it all in the new Kenwood; the first time she has used it and extra-exciting because of it. Then the mix is spooned into cake cases and baked for 15 minutes, which is about the time it takes to lick fingers, spoons and bowls clean.

She then topped them with glace icing and spirals of black icing dragged out into spider web shapes with a toothpick. (I helped with the spirals - the icing tube was a bit tough to squeeze for little hands, but she did manage three.)

All it needed then was a bag of jelly spiders (actually some of them are bats - we ran out of spiders) and there you have it - Halloween cupcakes and a step in the direction of a Brownies cooking badge.

Really fast courgettes and pasta

Finally the courgette plants have started producing and, as usual, after a complete drought we now have a glut of the things.

I plant two varieties of courgettes: Genovese, a pale green skinned variety, and Cocozelle, a stripy traditional Italian style one. I don't grow the dark, green skinned ones any more because they just used to get overlooked because we adore the taste of the other two varieties more.

Generally when we eat them with a meal I just roughly cube the courgettes and put them into a pan with about a tablespoon of butter and let them cook until they're soft.

Sometimes, though, I serve them with pasta and this is how:

Fusilli with courgettes and crème fraiche.

(This method is loosely based on a River Cafe recipe from the new River Cafe Classic Italian Cook Book which was previewed in the November issue of Red magazine, although it's something I've made before, but without a recipe. The River Cafe recipe uses 150g of butter which might be authentically Italian, but it's too much for me!)

Boil the fusilli according to the packet instructions in boiling salted water. I use 9oz for the four of us - two adults and two children. The River Cafe uses 320g, is that about 9oz? Probably.

Add a slug of olive oil to a pan and cook a sliced clove of garlic for a few minutes.

Add to that 250g (or so) of courgettes chopped into rounds, halved or quartered if the courgette is a little rotund.

Add a slice of butter. How much does this weigh? About 50g or so, but it's not important.

Leave to cook, turning the courgette and garlic over in the buttery oil, scraping the bits off the bottom. Use a medium to lowish heat - not too high, if it browns it'll taste bitter.

When the courgette is soft, take the pan off the heat and let it cool for a few moments. If you've timed this correctly the pasta will be about done by now too. Often it isn't, but the courgettes don't mind hanging around.

Add a couple of tablespoons of crème fraiche (I use the lower fat version) to the courgettes and stir. It will seem a bit thick, so add a couple of ladlefuls of the pasta cooking water and stir again. This will give you a lovely silky sauce.

Toss the fusilli into the lovely creamy courgette-y sauce and serve in bowls with plenty of freshly grated parmesan and black pepper.

Simple suppers

Just a couple of aides memoires for me really.

These are two suppers from the past week which got the thumbs up from the family.

The first was a Pork Pastry Plait.

250 g minced pork

Place in a bowl and add all/most/some of:

Chopped spring onions

Grated apple

Generous handful of chopped fresh herbs (parsley, thyme, sage, rosemary)

Salt and pepper

Worcestershire sauce

Soy sauce (actually tamari)

Two to three cream crackers whizzed to crumbs in the processor (or breadcrumbs or porridge oats)

Mix together and shape into a stubby, fat sausage.

Unroll a sheet of puff pastry and roll it out a little thinner. Place the pork on top and cut horizontal slashes in the pastry. Bring the ends up and then lattice the pastry strips across the meat, crossing them over and tucking the ends in as you go.

Place on a baking tray, brush all over with beaten egg and bake at Gas Mark 5 for about half an hour, until it is golden brown and cooked through.

I served this with some courgettes, fresh from the garden, which I cubed and then cooked quickly in about a teaspoonful of butter in a pan.

The second is Creamy Store Cupboard Pasta

This is a really fast tea and is perfect for one of those happy moments when you find the tail end of a tub of creme fraiche in the fridge, along with odds and sods of other tasty little treats.

Boil a handful or two of pasta per person in a big pot of salted water for 10 minutes, until al dente.

Raid the fridge for: Mushrooms, ham, cheese (soft or semi-soft, preferably blue), leftover olives anything really that goes with all of the above. Chop them up a bit. Toss the mushrooms into a pan with a little butter and some garlic, if you've got some (and you're not going to the dentist tomorrow. Although last time I went to the dentist she had definitely been eating garlic!)

When the pasta is cooked scoop out a cupful of the cooking water, drain the pasta and put it back into the hot pan. Add the creme fraiche and the mushrooms and all the other yummy bits you could find, stir around so that everything gets hot. If the sauce is a bit thick, add some of the water you reserved (which also helps the sauce to meld with the pasta).

Add some lovely fresh chopped herbs too, a good handful and some pepper and a swipe or two of nutmeg on the grater.

Pile into bowls and top with freshly grated parmesan and lashings of ground black pepper. This is never the same twice (it varies from fridge to fridge!) but it's always delicious!

Sunday pancakes

Sunday is always pancakes day. We don't rush out of bed, so it's usually at least 8am by the time I'm digging the blender out of the cupboard. The coffee maker goes on and bubbles away to Aled Jones on Radio Two's Good Morning Sunday while I make the batter. Steve Wright's Sunday Love Songs generally accompanies the actual cooking part. It all makes for a mellow, relaxed Sunday morning, before I charge off on a long run. Today it's an eight miler, so I feel quite at liberty to smother at least four of these pancakes in maple syrup or Nutella.

These are based on Nigella Lawson's banana buttermilk pancakes from 'Feast', but as ever I have tweaked things to suit the way I like to cook them.

RECIPE: Banananilla Sunday Pancakes

Place the following into a blender and whiz:

Two (or three) VERY ripe bananas, the sort that are so black they're falling out of their skins in a banana-type strip tease. Less ripe ones work too, but are less bananary. Green ones are foul. Just don't.

1 egg. Or two, if you've got hens and they're showing off. I have been known to add up to four eggs to this.

250 ml plain yoghurt. (The original recipe specifies buttermilk, if you've got a pot of that, use it. I've always got yoghurt and rarely got buttermilk. If you've got neither use milk, perhaps a little less to begin with, you can always add more. Acidify the milk with a little lemon juice - the acid reacts with the raising agents and makes the pancakes fluffy.)

150g plain flour

1tsp baking powder

half a teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

(Last Sunday I forgot to add the baking powder and the bicarb. The pancakes were still edible, but they tasted slightly sour - no alkaline agents for the acids in the yoghurt to react with and make carbon dioxide bubble to make the pancakes fluffy. Not just a recipe - a science lesson too!)

30g (about a tablespoonful - life's too short to measure this!) melted butter.

A good slug of vanilla extract.

Whiz together until nicely blended, then dollop spoonfuls (about one and a half tablespoonfuls per pancake) onto a hot griddle. Wait until bubbles appear...

...then flip over to cook the other side.

Pile onto a plate and serve.

Serve with maple syrup, golden syrup, Nutella, strawberry jam, peanut butter, chocolate sauce, toffee sauce, honey, etc!

Variations.

Add: More bananas, less bananas, very ripe pear, tablespoonful of peanut butter, blueberries (drop onto the surface of the pancakes before flipping), wholemeal flour, handful of porridge oats, chopped plain chocolate (choconananilla pancakes), the sky's the limit, play!

Simple autumnal supper

Has anyone else been enjoying Nigel Slater's Simple Suppers? It's on BBC1 in the early evening on a Wednesday, I think, but I've been missing it and catching up on iPlayer.

I love Nigel Slater. Not least because he's a good cook, not least because he's from the same neck of the woods as me and used to pass my childhood home on his school bus every day (according to his autobiography, Toast), but mainly because he cooks like I do and now he's got a programme all to his lovely self passing on all his brilliant tips.

He's not a slavishly follow a recipe man, just as I'm not that sort of woman. Who ever has all the ingredients to exactly follow a recipe? I don't and I'm sure most other people don't either. He cooks instinctively: What's in the garden? What's in the fridge? What's about to go off? What's just perfect for now? And then he wings it.

Tonight I wung it as usual. I was faced with a hungry man who wanted 'chicken, but tender' on a plate, and two equally hungry children, one of which has been clamouring for mashed potato for weeks. I ignored the latter (she hadn't been digging new steps in the garden) and I made up a chicken thing using a punnet of chicken thighs from (dratted) Tesco, the tail end of a chorizo from Narberth's glorious Spanish deli Ultracomeda, a couple of fabulous onions (proper boo-hooers these) and some nice maincrop spuds. Into the mix went some black olives and a jolly good glug of Taffy Apples cider, made in Wales and absolutely delicious (though it pains me to admit liking Welsh cider, being a Worcesetershire girl.) I remembered the lovely Nige and headed out into the garden for its contribution: A big handful of broadleaved thyme seemed to fit the bill.

I sizzled the chorizo, then added the chopped onions and cubed spuds. The thighs were already skinless and boneless so I snipped those into cubes with a pair of kitchen scissors (I find that much easier than using a knife) and added those to the pan. I then shared the Taffy Apples between the pan, the hungry husband and me (it was a 500 ml bottle), popped in the olives and the thyme and slapped on a lid. It was done, I decided, when the chicken was tender and the potatoes had gone soft and thickened the sauce a bit. I peppered it, but not salt as the chorizo is quite salty already.

While the chicken thing simmered I tackled a bowlful of mixed plums (Victoria, greengage, damson) that was slowly turning to honeyed mush. These I halved and tossed in a pan for a while with a tablespoon of butter and two of caster sugar. Result: thick, sweet, chunky plum sauce the colour of unicorns' eyes (which is a deep ruby red, by the way).

The chicken thing was lovely in bowls with steamed broccoli, the plums were beautiful as well as delicious with vanilla ice cream.

It was a simple, cheap, autumnal supper. I think the lovely Nigel would have been proud of me!

Happy Days...

I've been neglecting my cooking blog! Not because I haven't been cooking, but just lack of time. Anyway I was in receipt of a lovely shiny new cook book yesterday. (Mr PM: "Of course, you really need another cookbook. Quite obviously you haven't got enough already..." Sarcastic rolling of eyes, etc. See photo. It's not that many...).

But food, like clothes, develops over time. There are fads and fashions. Things go out of date. Why am I justifying myself?

So, I'm not going to review the new book (which was Rachel's Favourite Food by Rachel Allen, for those who want to know) instead I'm going to revisit an old favourite and tell you the tale of a favourite recipe from it.

Here it is:

This was from the days when young Jamie was still 'nobbut a lad', before he got into the politics of school dinners and the fact that people may watch his programmes by the million, but they don't actually cook (mostly because they can't).

It's an excellent book, full of lovely stuff that I love to cook (as the fact that it is bristling with green Post-It notes testifies).

So which recipes have I cooked most often? Beef Stew with Newcastle Brown Ale and Dumplings; Roasted Cod with cherry Tomatoes, Basil and Mozzarella; Baked Cod with Avocado, Prawns, Cream and Cheese; Chicken Breast Baked in a Bag with Cannellini Beans, Leeks, Cream and Marjoram; Chicken Breast Baked in a Bag with Mushrooms, Butter, White Wine and Thyme, are the ones I have cooked more than once without really altering them, although we do have Smush Ins, which is more of an idea than a recipe, but the king of recipes is Rosemary Skewered Monkfish with Pancetta and Bread.

Actually I have never cooked this one with monkfish or pancetta and I don't use the rosemary skewers or the recommended ciabatta either. Mine's a more British version.

What I do (for four) is buy a couple of nice fat skinless, boneless salmon fillets from the fishmonger (okay, I'll admit, it's in Tesco. Sigh.) Cut these into neat cubes, then cut up some nice white bread from an unsliced loaf (or an uncooked garlic bread) into similar-sized cubes. Thread them alternately with the fish on to metal skewers.

Take some nice smoked streaky bacon from kindly-reared happy British pigs and stretch it and wind it around the kebabs. Them bash a few needles of fresh rosemary (about a tablespoonful or two) and a clove of garlic in a pestle and mortar until, well, bashed. Add some green extra virgin olive oil, stir and then drizzle over the kebabs. (You can leave this bit out if you've used garlic bread, which is a really fast cheat's version of this recipe.)

Bake in a pre-heated oven at Gas Mark 6 (Jamie says 7, but I always cook it at 6)/22o degrees C/425 degrees F until the fish is cooked and the bread is golden brown and crispy. I usually serve this with some steamed broccoli or a green salad and I remove the skewers in the kitchen.

If we're feeling really hungry I might par-boil potato wedges for nine minutes, then spread them on a tray, spritz with oil and cook them on the highest shelf in the oven (and definitely as Gas 7 - or even 8 - this time.)

A great meal, loved by all the family (you can make dinky cubes for small children) and one we have at least once a month, if not more often. It could probably be barbecued in the summer too. I've known fish-hating children eat this (it has bacon sandwich flavours with lots of garlic and the fish is well hidden) and the bread soaks up all the good Omega oils from the fish, so even if they don't actually eat the salmon, they get all the good stuff in the crispy bread cubes (and I've never known anyone turn those down).