Lorraine Pascale - Home Cooking Made Easy

Once you have cooked all of the cheese wedges, place them on serving plates with the cranberry sauce and serve straightaway with a green salad.

Light & crispy tempura prawns & soy chilli dipping sauce

This is a great dish to impress friends. Prawns are perfect, but you could also use courgettes, aubergines, peppers and all sorts of vegetables as well if you like. I have made my own dipping sauce to serve with the tempura, but it is also delicious served with some ready-made chilli sauce.

Serves 3–4

500ml vegetable oil, for deep-frying

100g plain flour

100g cornflour

Pinch of salt

2 tbsp baking powder

180–200ml very cold sparkling water

Few ice cubes (not essential but it helps)

10 large raw prawns, peeled with tails still intact

Dipping sauce

20ml soy sauce

20ml mirin

½ chilli, deseeded and finely diced

½ clove of garlic, peeled and finely diced

1 x 5mm piece of fresh ginger, peeled and finely diced (or to taste)

Lay some kitchen paper on the work surface and place a wire rack over it. I put deep-fried food on this as soon as it is cooked because the fat can drip down onto the kitchen paper through the rack; this is better than letting the food sit in its own oil if put directly on kitchen paper. Have a slotted spoon or tongs at the ready, whichever is easiest for you to use.

Fill a medium, deep pan with enough oil to reach 5cm depth (I used about 500ml) and heat over a medium heat until a small piece of bread carefully placed in the oil browns in 50–60 seconds.

Just as the oil is almost at the right temperature, put the flour, cornflour, salt and baking powder in a bowl. Make a well in the centre and add the water. Mix everything together very quickly until just combined. The batter should be quite thick and it does not matter if there are still lumps. Add 2 or 3 ice cubes, then dip one of the prawns in the batter and let the excess drip off until you can still see a bit of prawn through the batter. Carefully add the prawns to the hot oil from a low height so the fat does not splatter. Do not overcrowd the pan, as this lowers the temperature of the oil and makes the prawns boil rather than fry, so add them in small batches and deep-fry for 2 minutes. The prawns will cook in 2–4 minutes (although this depends on how big the prawns are). Tempura batter is very pale, unlike fish and chip batter, so when it starts going from white to pale golden, the prawns should be ready. Check one by cutting it open to see if it is cooked. It should be white and not too glassy looking, and you will now know how long to cook the other prawns.

Remove the prawn with a slotted spoon or tongs and place it on the wire rack to drain, then repeat with the others. There will be enough batter here for some vegetables too, which are delicious.

Combine the sauce ingredients in a bowl and serve with the hot prawns.

Prosciutto & Brie toastie

I used to go round to my friend’s house in Witney for tea. Every so often, when cheese triangle sandwiches on white bread were not on the menu, her mum would fire up a machine that made the most perfect toasted cheese and ham sandwiches. I can never beat the perfection of those little triangle sandwiches, but this comes oh so close!

Serves 2

6 slices of prosciutto (streaky bacon will work well too)

Large knob of butter

4 slices of good thick crusty bread

Oil, for frying

100–150g Brie, ripped up into chunks

Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F), Gas Mark 6. Fry the prosciutto or bacon to just the way you like it, then set aside. Tip off any excess fat from the pan. Butter each slice of bread.

Heat some oil in a pan. Once the oil is hot, add two slices of bread, buttered side down, and divide the Brie and prosciutto or bacon between the bread. Put the other slices of bread on top, buttered side up, and using a fish slice, squish it down in the pan so it cooks more quickly. As soon as the bottom is toasty and golden brown, turn it over and cook the other side, squishing with the fish slice. I usually cook mine for about 2 minutes on each side. Once the toasties are cooked, remove them from the pan.

The chilli jam goes well with this, but a big blob of brown sauce is also a match made in heaven!

Satay chilli chicken

A quick easy canapé or starter, or just a tasty snack.

Serves 4

4 chicken breasts

Oil, for cooking

1 squidge of runny honey

1 small bunch of coriander leaves

Peanut sauce

100g crunchy peanut butter

1 clove of garlic, peeled and finely chopped

1 tbsp sesame oil

1–2 red chillies, finely chopped (depending on how hot you want it)

Pinch of soft light brown sugar

1 tbsp soy sauce

Juice of ½ lime

3–4 tbsp rice wine vinegar or mirin

1–2 tbsp water

Equipment

12 wooden kebab sticks cut so they can fit inside your biggest frying pan. Soak them in cold water for 30 minutes before using to prevent burning

Take a chicken breast and, using a pair of scissors and with the pointy end furthest away from you, cut the breasts into about three long thin strips, then set aside and continue with the other three chicken breasts.

Push a kebab stick along the length of a chicken piece, stopping just before the stick comes out the other end. Repeat with the rest of the chicken. Of course, if you don’t feel like threading pieces of chicken on sticks, you can just skip this step and serve them as strips instead.

Heat some oil in a large sauté pan or frying pan, add the chicken and cook well on each side until the chicken is completely cooked. Depending on the thickness of the breast pieces, this will take about 8 minutes. My pan is not big enough to do all the chicken in one go, so I usually put about 1½ breasts’ worth in at a time, then set them aside to cook the rest.

While the chicken is cooking, put all of the sauce ingredients into a blender and blitz to a rough consistency. Taste the sauce to see if you need to add any seasoning or perhaps a squeeze more lime juice, then set aside.

Once the chicken is almost cooked through, add a little honey to the pan and mix the chicken around in it until coated, then remove from the pan. If cooking the chicken in batches, leave the pan to cool a little, then wipe or rinse out the honey before adding the next batch, as it will burn if left in the pan. Add a little more oil and repeat with each batch.

Serve three satay sticks per person sprinkled with some coriander leaves and accompanied by the peanut sauce.

Breads

I have tried to make it my goal these days to bake a fresh hand-made loaf at least once a week. It is hard to beat the smell that meanders around the house as bread bakes in the oven. The first bread I ever made was at secondary school during my much loved Home Economics classes. They were little white bread rolls shaped into small bundles of deliciousness. Since then I have experimented with many different breads, some of which can be found in this chapter – such as old-fashioned English muffins, best served hot with loads of butter, the stunning pain d'epi, which often gets oooos and ahhs when brought to the table, and the divine ham, cheese and chive bread, which is ready from start to finish in under an hour.

‘Enthusiasm is the yeast that raises the dough.’

Paul J. Meyer

Sea salt & olive oil pain d’epi

The way of shaping this loaf transforms an ordinary baguette into quite a stunner. Place the loaf at the centre of the table so everyone can break off a big hunk. Although there is olive oil in the recipe, I like to serve a little extra oil with a drizzle of balsamic, but it goes really well with butter too. As with most bread, this is best served warm.