The Kitchen Diaries - Nigel Slater

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way through cooking, uncover the dish and stir in the mustard, turning the lamb as you do so. Cover once more and return to the oven. Serve with mashed potato and a bit more mustard.

      Enough for 2

      February 8

      A smoked

      fish supper

      There is something old-fashioned about a supper of smoked haddock, something redolent of the 1950s, when women wore an apron when they cooked and would get a meal on the table at the same time each day, year in, year out. I like my smoked haddock baked with a little cream, as I do almost anything smoked, but until recently was never sure what to eat with it. Mash never seemed right, buttered toast never substantial enough, rice too reminiscent of kedgeree. It was out of curiosity that I turned to beans, pale ones from a can, their texture a pleasing contrast. Now it is one of my favourite teas, though not the prettiest.

      The parsley is important here and should be vivid emerald green and full of life. I see no reason why you can’t use equally mealy cannellini beans if that is what you have, though I have used butter beans before now and they were good, too. This is a mild, gently flavoured dish, consoling even, for a cold night.

      smoked haddock – 400g

      butter

      milk – 250ml, plus a little more for later

      bay leaves

      flageolet beans – two 400g tins

      double cream – 300ml

      parsley leaves – a good fistful

      grain mustard – 1 heaped tablespoon

      steamed spinach, to serve

      Remove the skin from the smoked haddock and place the fish in a lightly buttered baking dish. Pour over the milk, then add enough water almost to cover the fish. Tuck in a couple of bay leaves and grind over some black pepper. Bake at 200°C/Gas 6 for about fifteen to twenty minutes or until you can pull one of the large, fat flakes of flesh out with ease. Drain and discard the milk.

      Rinse and re-butter the baking dish – you don’t want any bits of skin from the milk left behind. Rinse the beans in a sieve under running water, then empty them into a mixing bowl. Pour in the cream and a couple of tablespoons of milk, then chop the parsley and add it together with the mustard, a grinding of black pepper and a little salt. Go easy on the salt; smoked fish is saltier than fresh.

      Spoon the beans into the dish and lay the fish on top, spooning some of the creamy beans over the top to keep it moist. Turn the oven down to 180°C/Gas 4 and bake for about forty minutes, until the cream is bubbling and the sauce has thickened around the beans. Serve with spinach.

      Enough for 2

image

      February 9

      A pumpkin has been languishing in the vegetable rack for longer than I care to remember. To use it now would be more than a great satisfaction; it would be a relief.

      Deep red and gold, a cheering supper if ever there was one. This simple dish of roast vegetables stands or falls by the timing. I like to roast the pumpkin till it is soft but not quite collapsing, deep golden in colour, the edges slightly caramelised and sticky. Undercook it at your peril. The sauce is chunky and has a certain bitter-sweetness from the lightly blackened tomato skins. You may want to cook some brown rice to go with this, especially if you are having nothing to follow.

      tomatoes – 950g

      garlic – 2 cloves

      chillies – 2 small hot ones

      olive oil

      pumpkin or squash – 1kg

      Set the oven at 200°C/Gas 6. Cut the tomatoes in half and place them cut-side up on a baking sheet or in a roasting tin. Peel and finely slice the garlic, finely chop the chillies. Drizzle the tomatoes with oil, then season with salt and pepper and the garlic and chillies. Roast for forty-five to fifty minutes, till the tomatoes are soft and flecked with black.

      Meanwhile, halve and peel the pumpkin. Cut into thick, melon-like slices and scoop out the seeds with a spoon. Place on a baking sheet, toss in a little olive oil and season with salt and black pepper. Roast for forty minutes, turning it over after twenty minutes or so. It is done when it is fully tender to the point of a knife and nice and sticky on the cut edges.

      Roughly chop the tomatoes to give a coarse ‘sauce’. Serve alongside the roasted pumpkin, with brown rice if you wish.

      Enough for 2 as a main dish

      February 11

      Dinner is a couple of tins of Heinz baked beans, tarted up with finely chopped chillies, several shakes of Tabasco and mushroom ketchup, and a tablespoon of black treacle. It will do.

      There is no set time for eating in our house, there never has been. One day lunch will be at twelve noon, the next four in the afternoon. Supper can be as early as six and as late as midnight. Neither is our eating always leisurely. Sometimes it is just a question of getting food inside you.

      Many is the time supper has been sausage sandwiches all round, either with a jar of mustard on the table, or, if I can be bothered, a pot of wasabi mayonnaise, made by beating the jade green spice-paste from its tube into some commercial mayonnaise. The sausages will be hot and sticky and the mayo shockingly spicy. The general heat is tempered by soft bread cut thick and bottles of cold beer. Other times it may be pepperoni pizzas delivered by bike or sushi or sashimi from town. Just occasionally supper will come out of a bottle.

      But there are also occasions when supper is nothing at all. From a health perspective this is probably not to be recommended, but frankly that is sometimes just what I need. A lot of water will pass my lips, but no food.

      For the most part, I eat one decent meal a day and then some other stuff. Under which you can file beans on toast, bacon sandwiches, fish-fingers, cheese on toast, more cheese on toast and shop-bought sushi. Sourdough bread dunked into olive oil has been dinner on more than one occasion, as have slices of rye bread with a bit of smoked salmon. Other times I just stand at the fridge eating up the remains of meals past. Cold risotto is quite nice after the initial shock, though not as much fun as cold apple pie.

      But I will tell you the best trick for making your bacon sandwich, cold sausage or bit of day-old fridge-rice take on an instant appeal. Have it with a glass of wine, better still a glass of Champagne. Yes, a scavenged supper can be made to sing with pickles or fresh, rough-textured chutney, but nothing works quite as well as a glass of wine.

      February 12

      Another

      smoked fish

      supper

      At the far end of the fishmonger’s slab are the smoked goods: the primrose-coloured haddock and golden mackerel; the elegantly proportioned trout, and the brick-coloured lumps of cod’s roe. There are also kippers, their skin shining silver, gold and black. Sometimes I buy one to cook for a lone supper, a slice of butter melting on its mahogany flesh. Other times, with more to feed, I make fishcakes, plump ones the size of a yo-yo.

      I make these little golden fishcakes as a change from the more traditional haddock version, usually in the winter when smoky flavours seem particularly appropriate. Parsley sauce isn’t right with the kippers, so I make a dill-flavoured mayonnaise instead, or sometimes have them

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