Nigel Slater - The Kitchen Diaries

Dinner out tonight, so just a quick snack for lunch. The perfect salad sandwich is all about the vitality of the ingredients: the uber-freshness of the watercress, the jelly-soft tomatoes, the crunch of the ice-cold cucumber and the heat of the radishes against the soft, white and impeccably fresh bread. If you are not obsessively fussy about every detail of this sandwich, it won’t hit the spot. You might as well not bother. Lunch today is that perfect salad sandwich, with old-fashioned crunchy lettuce, cucumber, radishes, spring onions and tomato. There is a slick of mayonnaise, a dusting of fine sea salt and bread so soft, thick and doughy it could double for a duvet. For once, something is as it should be, a sandwich to be proud of.

The Ginger Pig has a display of lamb chops that is irresistible even to someone who has had them once already this week. Thick, deep red and meaty, they have been cut from the middle of the loin and have a generous bone on which to chew. Rarely have I seen such tempting pieces of meat.

There are two of us tonight so I buy four out of greed rather than necessity. I am set on some sort of meaty supper with Indian spicing, not a curry exactly, but something vibrant. The chops will do fine for this.

At home I raid the spice jars, a teaspoon each of four seeds: mustard, coriander, fennel and cumin, left whole rather than ground. I fry them gently in two tablespoons of groundnut oil, then stir in two peeled and chopped shallots, two hot red chillies that I have seeded and chopped, and four crushed cloves of garlic. I let everything soften without colouring, then stir in a grated knob of ginger the size of a walnut in its shell and six chopped tomatoes, their seeds and juice. Once everything has come to the boil, I crumble in some sea salt, turn the heat down and let it simmer, partly covered with a lid, for fifteen minutes.

Off the heat I squeeze in the juice of a lime and add a handful of chopped coriander leaves and a little more salt. Once the spicy-red slop has cooled, I dunk the lamb chops in it and leave them for an hour or so.

The chops, cooked under an overhead grill, their marinade still clinging to them, are a fiery, juicy delight. The spices bring heat and savour but in no way overpower the lamb; the fat is crisp and lightly scorched from the grill, the flesh tender and rich with pink juices. Rarely have I enjoyed a chop quite so much.

There have been three restaurant meals this week, including sensationally good plates of hot salt cod fritters at Moro in Exmouth Market and a wonderfully elegant dish of kidneys with lentils and potato purée at Locanda Locatelli in the West End. Add to that a bowl of fried oysters in a clear broth at the ‘cheap-as-chips’ Japan Centre in Piccadilly Circus and I have barely had to cook at home at all. I don’t think the kitchen has ever stayed tidy for that long in its entire life. Eating out remains an absolute treat for me; especially so this year, when for one reason or another I have spent so much time at home. Even if I could eat out every night, I wouldn’t. Although I will admit to occasionally getting a bit ‘cooked out’, I cannot pretend I don’t enjoy putting something I have made for someone on the table. To this day, it still sends tingles down my spine.

I have a theory that I love cooking for people after all these years because I rarely attempt too much. Many is the time supper is little more than a bowl of soup and a salad, or perhaps some chicken pieces roasted with butter and served with a handful of green leaves. It is the way I prefer to eat, but it also happens to be a lot less trouble than roast chicken with gravy, spuds and vegetables, followed by pudding and custard. I like to think of it as a love of simplicity, but it could also be a mixture of greed tinged with laziness.

We eat roast chicken, mashed butternut squash and the juices from the roasting tin mixed with a little white vermouth and a shot of lemon juice. Dessert is sliced mangoes and whole rambutans that look like diminutive pan-scrubbers.

It’s funny how even on the coldest day people seem to appreciate a salad – if, of course, the ingredients are right. In other words, not tomato, cucumber and lettuce. Hot, spicy leaves such as watercress or rocket go down well, especially when matched with something sharp and bright like orange or grapefruit. With that I would chuck in something meaty, such as bacon, pieces of duck breast (it is almost as cheap as chicken now) or a grilled breast of game. Often as not, though, a big salad like this is made to use up cold roast chicken, or perhaps a game bird from the weekend.

The oranges right now are as fat and juicy as I have ever known them and I will eat them at every chance. This time, they wake up a salad made from yesterday’s roast chicken.

The main-course salads I value the most are those that are refreshing. This, with salty, soy-toasted pumpkin seeds and the clean, fresh taste of oranges, is one of the best. You could serve couscous with it, if you wish, or perhaps a Lebanese tabbouleh.

pumpkin seeds – 3 tablespoons

a little dark soy sauce

whole skinned almonds – 2 tablespoons

watercress – 50g

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