Nigel Slater - The Kitchen Diaries

Spoon the vegetables, barley and plenty of broth into shallow bowls with flakes of sea salt and several firm grinds of the pepper mill.

Enough for 4

There is cold meat to eat up from yesterday’s roast but it needs something warming to sit alongside. So potatoes it is, spiced with onions and chillies, all cooked to a crisp. To be honest, I let it cook for longer than I intend, with the result that the onions are crisp and slightly singed. A plate of big, mouth-popping flavours that I cool by drizzling yoghurt over at the table.

When Indian cooks bake potatoes, they tend to add spices and some sort of liquid, such as water or yoghurt, but I see no reason why you cannot add the yoghurt afterwards, which has the advantage of allowing the potatoes to crisp nicely. A moderate heat is needed here to stop the spices burning in the oven.

potatoes – 4 medium

onions – 2 medium

vegetable or groundnut oil

red chillies, as hot as you like – 2, chopped

garlic – 2 cloves, crushed

cumin seeds – half a teaspoon

ground turmeric – half a teaspoon

To finish:

natural yoghurt – 4 tablespoons

a little mild ground chilli

young mint leaves – a palmful, chopped

Peel the potatoes, cut them into the sort of pieces you would for normal roasting, then bring them to the boil in deep water. Add salt to the pot and simmer for ten to fifteen minutes, until the potatoes are approaching tenderness. You should be able to slide a knifepoint through them with almost no pressure. Drain the potatoes thoroughly, then very gently shake them in their pan so the edges fluff and ‘bruise’. Set the oven at 180°C/Gas 4.

Peel the onions and slice them finely. Heat enough oil in a roasting tin to make a thin film over the bottom. The thicker the base, the less likelihood there is of the spices burning. As the oil warms, add the sliced onions and let them soften, then stir in the chopped chillies, garlic and cumin and let them warm through, stirring (and watching like a hawk) so that they do not burn. Add the potatoes to the hot oil, add the turmeric, then slowly stir and toss the potatoes so that they are covered with the seasoned oil.

Roast the potatoes in the preheated oven until they have started to crisp. Thirty to thirty-five minutes or so should do it. You don’t want them to be as brown as classic roast potatoes. They should be golden and flecked with spice.

As the potatoes come from the oven, grind over a seasoning of salt, then spoon over the yoghurt, sprinkle with a very little mild ground chilli and scatter with the chopped mint leaves.

Enough for 4 as a side dish

A chill day, the sky the colour of wet aluminium. I need the sort of meal that ends with everyone squishing their potatoes into the meaty, oniony sauce on their plate. A sauce that is warm rather than spicy, enriched with the goodness of meat cooked on the bone.

The butcher suggests lamb shanks, cheaper now they are not so trendy. I buy nothing else; there is wine, bay, rosemary, garlic and grain mustard in the kitchen already. The preparation will take ten minutes, the cooking an hour and a half on a low heat. A supper of melting tenderness.

olive oil

lamb shanks – 2 small

onions – 4 small to medium

bay leaves – 3

sprigs of rosemary – 2 or 3

vegetable or meat stock – 250ml

red wine – 250ml

garlic – 3 cloves

grain mustard – 1 heaped tablespoon

To serve:

mashed potato and a bit more mustard

Set the oven at 160°C/Gas 3. Warm a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a roasting tin large enough to take the meat snugly, then seal the lamb on all sides in the hot oil. The fat and the cut end of the meat should take on a little colour.

Peel the onions, slice them in half from root to tip, then each half into quarters. Add them to the lamb with the bay leaves and the leaves from the rosemary sprigs. Pour in the stock and red wine. Peel the garlic cloves and squash them flat with the blade of a heavy knife. Drop them into the roasting tin with a grinding of salt and some coarse black pepper. Cover the dish with foil, place in the oven and bake for an hour and a half.

Half 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

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

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.