DIY Baked Beans

This is very easy, but takes time. Elapsed time that is – there’s barely ten minutes’ work but it is spread out over twenty four hours.

• 250g dried Haricot beans
• 400g total of diced carrots, onion and celery (or whatever you happen to have to hand)
• one 400g tin of chopped tomatoes (with the juice!)
• a handful (75g) of finely diced bacon
• some herbs (I used a bunch of fresh thyme on this occasion)

Here’s what I do:

1. soak the beans overnight in cold water (won’t hurt if they stay soaking until you get back from work the following day)
2. put the beans in a change of water, and bring to a savage boil for fifteen minutes, reduce to a gentle bubble and leave for 45 minutes, but an hour won’t hurt – you could chuck in a bay leaf if you wanted to keep them company in the simmering phase
3. meanwhile, gently fry the bacon in a heavy casserole until it’s brown and most of the fat has oozed out
4. add the chopped veg, and a glug of olive oil, and continue to fry (you could use butter instead of olive oil for a more North European flavour)
5. let the veg gently fry until they’re soft, and the onion is going gold around the edges; probably a good twenty minutes
6. now is probably a good time to get the oven going at 150°C
7. by now the beans should be starting to soften up, so drain them, and add to the casserole, reserving the cooking liquid
8. add the tin of tomatoes, and then enough of the cooking liquid to cover
9. there’s probably enough salt in the bacon, but taste, and add a touch more if you feel it’s warranted
10. add the herbs, grind over some black pepper, give the pot a good stir and consign it to the oven

It will need around two hours. Not only are the beans continuing to cook, they’re soaking up liquid, and the rate at which they do this is known only unto themselves. So, keep an eye. If the liquid looks low, top up with some water from a freshly boiled kettle. At the ninety minute mark, have a taste – the beans need to be cooked through, so no grittiness. (Otherwise they will expand in your stomach and make you explode, at least that’s what my grandmother told me when I was small.)

Serve up as a posh side to sausages or duck, or a mid week supper in its own right.

Or wait ’til nobody’s watching and scoff it on toast with cheese on top.

You could of course add stuff. A splash of Worcester sauce wouldn’t hurt. You could replace the bacon with chorizo, and maybe add some garlic as well. Once you get going with the sausages and duck it becomes full blown cassoulet, which is glorious in its own right, but lacks the comforting simplicity of this dish.

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Art of the Tart

This is a rough and simple tart; not as refined as a quiche. The addition of egg to the pastry makes it remarkably forgiving. No blind baking, rolling, or faffing required.

For my 10″ diameter, 1½” deep pie dish, I use:

• 220g plain flour
• 110g butter, cold and cut up into small cubes
• pinch salt
• one egg
• some milk

In a large mixing bowl, rub the butter into the flour and salt until the consistency of breadcrumbs. Beat the egg and mix it in with a palette knife, or failing that, a spoon. You may be able to coax it into a ball with your hands, but more than likely you’ll need to mix in a tablespoon of milk; maybe more. Wrap in cling film and pop in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

The basis of the filling is three eggs and 250mL double cream. For a richer consistency, you can replace one egg with two yolks. This produces a fluffy, but set consistency, for a more wobbly version, increase the cream.

Today, I’ve got some pancetta (10 wafer thin rashers, about 70g) so I fry that gently until crisp, and set aside. No need to drain on paper towels, as the fat is flavoured with the spices in the cure, and we want it to infuse the rest of the filling.

Push the pastry into the pie dish with your hands. (I don’t need to butter my ceramic dish, your mileage may vary.) You could roll it, but there’s really no need. If it tears, just patch it. If you end up with more on one side of the dish than the other, just rip some off and patch. As I said, it forgives much, although if you work it too hard, and it’s a hot day, the butter will start to melt, so whack it back in the fridge if this happens.

Today I spread the pancetta in the bottom of the pastry case, and beat together the remaining ingredients, with some salt, pepper, nutmeg, and some grated grana. Any kind of Italian hard cheese will do.

Into the oven at 150°C for an hour. The case looks underfull.

…and then the filling puffs up, alarmingly…

…before relaxing at the end. Keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t burn. You’ll see that the pastry shrinks away from the sides of the dish, so easy to rescue.

Variations

This is only the beginning. You could:

• peel and slice 750g of brown onions, and gently gently gently fry them in butter for an hour or so, with salt, pepper, and maybe a clove – allow to cool and pour over the cream/eggs
• do the same with some leeks, and add some goat’s cheese to the mix
• replace the goat’s cheese with some salmon, smoked or otherwise
• add some steamed (and vigorously squeezed) spinach to the fray

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Cassoulet

Let’s forget about confit of duck, goose fat, and all the fancy stuff. Cassoulet is about fat and beans, so today’s is done with sausages and bacon. Annoyingly, the beans need to be the dried ones, so you will have to soak them. Tinned beans would turn to mush during the cooking. Delia makes a good point that if you’re using sausages, make sure the meat content is reasonably high, as bready sausages will also collapse.

I’m using the following (feeds four with seconds and leftovers):

• six Toulouse sausages (about 400g)
• 250g dried haricot beans
• an onion, a couple of carrots, and a couple of sticks of celery; all chopped up (a similar weight to the sausages)
• four cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced
• about 75g tasty bacon of some sort chopped into quarter inch cubes (a single vacuum pack of cubed pancetta ideal)
• a 400g tin of chopped tomatoes, drained – if we leave the juice then it’s too tomatoey and starts to resemble high class baked beans
• two bay leaves
• about a teaspoon dried thyme (or half a bunch fresh)

The pot. Pick a large one that’s good for the oven and the stove top, as we’re visiting both locations.

The beans need to be soaked in a litre of cold water, overnight, after which they’ll double in mass. (St Delia mentions the idea of putting the beans in cold water in a saucepan, bringing to the boil, turning the heat off and leaving for three hours as a way to accelerate the process.)

Once that’s done, change the water, apply some heat and get them going at a vicious boil for 15 minutes. After that, reduce to a simmer, and pop them on them on the back burner, both literally and figuratively. (You’ll need the front of the stove later.)

Crank the oven up to 160ºC, putting the sausages and bacon into the pot and the pot into the oven. Keep an eye on them, turning the sausages occasionally so we get an all over tan. After about half an hour, the sausages will be done enough for our purposes, so transfer the pot to the hob, on a low heat. Also, at this point, the beans will have been simmering for about 30 minutes, leave ‘em on the back burner, ready for action in a moment.

(But don’t turn off the oven.)

Remove the sausages from the pot, and set to one side. Tip the veg into the pot, and gently fry in the fat that will have been exuded by the pig. After about five minutes add the garlic, and fry until translucent; about two minutes. (Best way to do this is shove the veg to one side so there’s a small exposed bit of the bottom of the pan where the garlic can fry. A splash of olive oil to assist if required.)

Deglaze with a splash of wine (white or red, or failing that some hot water) and then add the beans plus enough of the cooking liquid to almost-but-not-quite cover everything. Think runny, rather than soupy. Herbs, salt, pepper.

Return the sausages on top. I’d slice the sausages into three or four pieces each. Return to the oven for another two hours, lowering the temperature to about 140ºC. Leave the pot uncovered so the top gradually darkens and becomes sticky. Pretty much impossible to overdo, but check the liquid levels every so often, and if necessary, top up from a freshly boiled jug.

Despite every town in the south of France claiming that it (and it alone) is the Home of Cassoulet, there’s no definitive recipe. You could…

• sprinkle some breadcrumbs on top about 30 minutes before it’s done
• double the quantity of sausage
• do it with pork belly cut up into two inch cubes instead of the sausages – the pork belly will need much longer – at least an hour – and a splash of water in the bottom of the pot – you might even want to do the pork belly for three hours so it totally breaks down

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The Major is threatening to feed us with his cassoulet, which is a far superior product, and will feature his very own confit of duck. (I shall report back.)

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Butternut Squash and Chorizo Soup

Another easy soup for the mid-week zombie march. You will need:

• one butternut squash (or a very small pumpkin)
• about a handful (50g) of chopped up chorizo (a reasonably spicy one, preferably – you could use pancetta but I don’t think that would deliver the same amount of excitement)
• about a litre of stock (chicken, vegetable, or just reach for the Marigold powdered boullion)

Cut the squash down the middle, scoop out the seeds with a metal spoon, and slice a channel down the middle, with channels across as well. Butternut squash are treacherous, so be careful when you do this.

Pack the chorizo into the hollows, and grind over a spot of salt and pepper. Put them in a shallow baking dish, and into the oven at 180ºC for an hour. (The pancetta will ooze fat, so don’t use a baking sheet unless you want hot pig fat on the floor of your oven.)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, get the stock into a saucepan, and hot. I had a block of stock in the freezer (no idea whether it was animal, vegetable or mineral) so popped it in the pan to defrost. (End result: vegetable, if a little on the bland side.)

When you retrieve the squash from the oven, the channels will have opened out and the chorizo fat soaked into the flesh. In addition, the flesh on the surface will have started to caramelise. Yum.

Let the squash cool a bit. Using a pair of barbecue tongs to hold them, use a metal spoon to scrape out the soft flesh and chorizo, and add it to the saucepan of hot stock. Stroke the flesh gently with the spoon and it should come off the skin easily. The biggest challenge of this operation is not to simply eat the hot squash then and there. (It does make a terrific side dish.)

The soup will then need to be simmered for another fifteen minutes or so, but another half hour if the flesh was a little fibrous, i.e. hadn’t cooked all the way through in the oven.

I use the hand blender (purée wand in US English) to smooth out any last pockets of resistance. You could just have a go with a potato masher and leave it chunky.

Salt and pepper to taste. Maybe a teensy pinch of paprika if you’ve used pancetta.

Chorizo and Chickpea Soup

Yeah, yeah, tins and packets, but an ideal mid week supper for the braindead. It’s about an hour of elapsed time, but only five minutes’ actual work.

The herbs and spices in this one should be subtle.

• 400g chopped up onions, celery, carrots, whatever (a 400g bag of the pre-prepped stuff from Waitrose is ideal)
• 400g tinned toms (plus equal amount hot water)
• 400g tin chickpeas, drained
• 50g diced or thinly sliced chorizo (or loads more if you fancy)
• a clove or two
• a pinch of
  • dried oregano
  • ground cumin
  • paprika

Gently fry the chorizo to render the fat. Expect this to take about ten minutes.

Add the soffritto, and a pinch of salt. Continue to fry, until soft, stirring from time to time. Again, another ten minutes.

Add the toms, an equal amount of hot water, the chickpeas and the herbs/spices. If you’ve got a bottle of wine on the go, then add a splash.

Adjust seasoning, and simmer for about half an hour. The starch from the chickpeas will thicken it, so you may need more water.

Mince Pies

No major secrets to making mince pies, but you will need to do some calculating and engineering to get the pastry circles the right size. I use muffin tins (in which I’ve made all sorts of things, but never muffins) and aim for a pie about a half an inch deep.

This will use up about half of the mincemeat in the previous recipe, and produce 24 small pies. (I don’t hold with huge deep pies, as they will go soggy.)

My parents used to get very worked up about making pastry from scratch. I don’t think there’s any major secret, other than not letting the fat melt. It helps if you’re the sort of person about whose cold hands people complain.

• 350g plain flour (you could substitute 25g of ground almonds for 25g of the flour if you fancied)
• a pinch of salt
• 75g butter
• 75g lard (you could use all butter but the pastry would not be as crisp nor as light)
• 25g caster sugar (about 2 tablespoons)
• mincemeat (around 500g)

Start by filling a small bowl or large teacup with cold water and putting it in the freezer.

Roughly chop up the fat, and then pop all the ingredients into a large bowl and rub the flour into the fat with the tips of your fingers until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes. Some recipes tell you to do this stage in the blender, which I reckon just creates unnecessary washing up. (If it’s a hot day, or the room in which you’re working has a blazing oven or fire, then there is a slight risk the mix may go slimy, that is, the fat will start to melt. If this happens, wrap in cling film, and pop it into the fridge for ten minutes to recover.)

Retrieve the now icy water from the freezer, and mix it in with your hands, one tablespoon at a time, until the pastry comes together in a ball. There’s enough fat for it not to stick to the bowl. You’ll probably need 5 – 6 tablespoons, i.e. 75 – 90mL, maybe one or two more. Tightly cover the ball in cling wrap, and put it into the fridge for at least 30 minutes to rest. (This is vital, otherwise it will not behave. At all.)

Once the pastry has rested, flour a work surface, and divide the ball into four roughly equal pieces. A single heroic sheet will be too much trouble to roll. Roll the pastry as thin as it will go, without tearing: probably 2-3 millimetres thick.

Now, you’ll need to cut the pastry into large and small circles, for the bases and lids, respectively. You could use a pastry cutter, I tend to use a large tumbler and a small tumbler. Press bases and lids in alternation, so you don’t run out of pastry and find you don’t have enough lids. Using the quantities above, I got enough pastry for about 16 pies on the first attempt. Squish all the off-cuts of pastry into a ball and roll out again to do the rest. I needed to re-roll a second time for the final four.

Get the oven going. I crank my fan-forced up to 200ºC.

Put the large discs into the muffin moulds. Doesn’t matter too much if there are wrinkles etc as these will smooth out during baking. Put about a tablespoon of mincemeat in each pie. Try not to overstuff. Less is more. Pop the lids on. If you moisten the edges, the lids stand a chance of sticking to the bases. (In the photo above you can see that the lids look like they’re about to escape, but are in fact firmly glued in place by the mincemeat: I should have made both bases and lids a whisker larger.)

Twenty minutes in the oven should do the trick. Whip the pies out of the moulds and onto a cooling rack, and dust with icing sugar. (This is purely for visual effect.)

Venison Sausages

Grumpy? Maybe it’s because it’s cold, wet and miserable, or perhaps there’s just not enough sausage in your life. This is based on a similar idea where Saint Nigel roasts thinly sliced spuds, and then slips some mackerel fillets on just before the end. In this case, I’m using venison sausages, although any kind of sausage is good.

To prick or not to prick? Some people get very passionate about this: see Matthew Fort’s articles. Out of scientific curiosity, I pricked half of the sausages, but couldn’t tell once they were done.

I used:

• 6 sausages + 500g charlottes, sliced about 5mm thick; no need to peel
• salt+pepper
• you could add thyme, garlic, sage, bay leaves etc – I popped two unpeeled gloves of garlic in

Now, I don’t know how fatty your sausages are, nor how thickly you sliced your spuds, so there is no foolproof procedure for what happens next – St Delia would doubtless be horrified. Start with 45 minutes at 160ºC (fan forced temp) and then take a look. The sausages will most likely be done, but the spuds will need a bit longer, pick one of the larger pieces and taste it to make sure. Pop the sausages to one side (on a plate covered with foil is a good start) and put the spuds back in, turning the oven up to 200ºC, and see how they’re looking after 15 minutes. Don’t despair if they take longer, just slip the sausages back on top for a few minutes to warm them up, if necessary.

The final phase is straightforward. Dole out the bangers and spuds, tip out any excess fat from the tin (not down the drain!) and add a splash of port plus a generous spoon of redcurrant jelly. Tonight I used 30mL of port and about a tablespoon of redcurrent jelly, but feel free to mess around with the proportions. The port will hiss and spit, and the jelly will sit there unhelpfully, so stir like mad. (Or you could melt the jelly into the port in another saucepan if you don’t mind the extra washing up.) The resulting sauce/gravy is just the right thing, although might need to be pushed through a coarse sieve to get any recalcitrant lumps of jelly and spud out. (Munch them when nobody’s watching.)

Croque Monsieur

Ahem. Toast the bread first, in the toaster, but get the grill going now. Spread the toast with a layer of wholegrain mustard: this stops the ham curling up at the edges. Ham. Cheese: preferably hard and mean, so a strong Cheddar, Gruyère, Comté or Cantal.  Under the now hot grill until the cheese starts to bubble. Black pepper. Job done.

Pizza

I love pizza, as should all Right Thinking Men and Women.

It’s easy to make at home, and fun. A favourite procedure of mine is this: make the dough and the sauce the night before, as they’ll keep in the fridge. Then, get each guest to bring: a pizza ingredient, and a cheese. (Co-ordinate before, so we don’t have the scenario from Sesame Street where everyone brings potato salad to the King’s Picnic.) Then, all you need do is have plenty of cold, cold beer on hand, and whip up pizzas over the course of the evening. If the combinations become more eccentric as the night goes on, so be it.

Note: This procedure produces thin, crusty pizzas. If you want American style, deep pizzas, then I can’t help you.

The Dough

For enough dough to feed six in one sitting, i.e. make about six smallish pizzas, I use the following:

• 300g strong flour (i.e. bread flour)
• 200g plain flour – I’m not quite sure where these proportions come from, they’re scribbled on a piece of manky paper from years ago – you could probably just go with 100% strong flour if you prefer – you might also try 100% Italian “doppio zero” flour for authenticity
• one sachet dried yeast (normally about 5-7g)
• 10g salt (the posh brand of sea salt is good here, save the other stuff for boiling pasta)
• a gloop, alright 20mL, of olive oil, yer best extra-virgin-on-the-ridiculous – you could be authentic and replace with the same amount of lard, this is called the strutto
• 375mL very warm water

Place the dry ingredients in a bowl and combine, and gradually add the water, whilst stirring.

You’ll probably want to stop after about 325mL, if the dough is fairly dry, add another 25mL, so you end up with something slightly sticky. If it’s still dry, then you may need the final 25mL. Mix in the olive oil. You’ll probably find that the spoon became fairly useless about halfway through the mixing process and you’ll need to use your hands.

Knead for about ten minutes, and then plonk into a clean bowl, cover with a teatowel, and allow to rise. It’ll need about an hour, depending on the ambient temperature. (Some recipes tell you to oil the bowl first, to stop the dough sticking. I’ve never had a problem.)

That’s it. You don’t need a second rising: it’s ready for action. At this point, you can also put it in the fridge, and it will keep for a week in an airtight container. Not too airtight, as it will continue to rise and you don’t want an explosion. (One of my friends says “three weeks”, as apparently the yeast is so mean, no other microbes will dare go anywhere near it.)

The Sauce

Forget this pizza bianca crap. There’s gotta be tomato sauce, and I think it ought to be homemade. Doesn’t need to be fancy, though. Assuming you’ve made the dough in the quantities above, you’ll need…

• four cloves of garlic
• a tablespoon of olive oil
• a 500g carton of passata

Just chop up the garlic and fry it in the olive oil, when done, add the passata, bring to the boil, and then reduce the heat to a gentle simmer. Add salt and pepper to taste. After about an hour the sauce will have reduced by half and be ready for action.

Now, that’s a pretty inoffensive sauce; inoffensive being a synonym for unexciting. I’d also consider some of the following:

• chuck in half a teaspoon of chillis when frying the garlic
• a spoon of dried oregano once you’ve added the tomatoes
• some anchovies
• a shake of the Tabasco bottle
• a teaspoon of red wine vinegar
• some dried basil (save the fresh stuff for the pizza topping)

The Topping

Less is more, alright. Anything that can be, should be thinly sliced.

• salami and olives
• prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella
• anchovies and anything
• raw prawns that have been marinated in something interesting
• capers, crème fraîche, and smoked salmon (put it on after the pizza has come out of the oven)
• those “chicken tikka mini fillets” you get from M&S, some mango chutney, and a splash of yoghurt (with some dried mint mixed in) once it comes out of the oven
• anything from the antipasto counter at Camisa’s
• someone said that putting bolognese sauce on it was wrong – I was so intrigued by this that I tried it with some leftovers and it was marvellous

Putting it all Together

Now for the fun bit.

Get the oven going, and crank it up as far as it will go. Place a heavy baking sheet on a high shelf, and let that heat up.

Get another baking sheet, the same size as the one that’s heating up, and use this as your rolling board: it’ll be obvious in a few paragraphs why. Spread a handful of dry semolina or coarse polenta over it, which will stop the dough sticking.

Break off a fist sized chunk of dough, about 150g, and start rolling it out.

This will make a pizza big enough to fit on a large dinner plate. I’ve never owned a rolling pin, so end up using a wine bottle. You want to get it about half a centimetre thick. Once you’ve got it reasonably flat, feel free to use your hands to stretch it. Make sure, once it’s done, that there’s plenty of semolina underneath, and it slides around without too much trouble. You’ll notice quite a bit of the semolina embeds itself in the surface of the dough. This will cook, and add an extra crunchiness to the finished product, so don’t be shy.

Put the ingredients on top.

Now take it over to the oven. With a bit of luck, and enough semolina underneath, you can slide it off the cold baking sheet and onto the hot baking sheet. About eight minutes in the oven should do it.

Stating the Obvious

Some things to note:

• if you’re going to top with mozzarella, make sure it’s the industrial strength stuff from the cow, and not the exquisitely delicate stuff from the buffalo – you can use the latter, but if you do, pop it on a minute before you take it out of the oven
• beer is mandatory
• pineapple is an abomination
• so is processed ham

Lesser Piggy Lentils

This used to be a favourite emergency mid week supper at my last shared house.

• pancetta – about 100g – one of those little packets you get in the supermarket and which I always have lurking at the back of the freezer
• a small onion
• 150g lentils (I’m using Puy lentils, ‘cos that’s what happens to be in the cupboard)
• one 450g tin of chopped tomatoes

You will need to:

1. put the lentils in a small pan of water; enough to cover them, and then about another inch or two
2. add salt and a bay leaf (you could add a teaspoon of Marigold Boullion, but since I’m using Puy lentils, they’re powerful enough on their own), bring to the boil, and then simmer until they’re tender; around twenty minutes
3. meanwhile, put the pancetta in another saucepan (two pot shocker!)
   
   and gently fry until dark and crunchy, and all the fat has run off – my pancetta was very watery so had to simmer a bit until all the water had evaporated before it started to fry properly
   
4. slice up the onion and add that to the pancetta, and fry until soft
5. I’ve pushed the onion and pancetta to one side and fried a clove of garlic as well
   
6. about this point, the lentils should be done, so drain them, and then put them in with everything else – that layer of tasty tasty pig fat on the bottom of the saucepan will be absorbed by the lentils
7. finally, add the tomatoes – if you don’t like the dish too fruity, then drain them first, and add the juice gradually until it tastes about right
   
8. cover and simmer for a few minutes to let the flavours mingle – pepper to taste

A good mid week main, or quite an impressive side dish for sausages.

Variations

You might consider:

• adding some chilli at the same time as the onions
• some curry powder
• adding a splash of white wine at some point (possibly into a glass and down your throat whilst cooking)