A Rich Cabinet

Monday: haloumi, beetroot and purple sprouting broccoli, with new potatoes mixed in. Not bad at all.

Tuesday: Lamb steak, tomatoes, baby aubergines, lentils, and nice flavour mix borrowed from this lamb tagine recipe; with couscous, plus threw in some leftover beetroot from yesterday’s dinner. Pink couscous, pretty! Cooking time: preparing, stirring, etc, about half an hour; a little over an hour from start to finish. Yummy.

Wednesday: Potato, chorizo and spinach soup. Simple recipe largely relying on the chorizo for flavour (additional flavouring: onion, butter, mustard seeds and a little stock concentrate); total cooking time no more than 40 minutes, including 10-15 minutes peeling, chopping, etc. Very good comfort food. (Could probably do a veggie version with a bit of extra flavouring - maybe some cheese.)

Thursday: Baked sweet potato and portobello mushroom, with tomato sauce (one I made earlier, out of the freezer) with aduki beans (also from the freezer - a fantastic idea). Total cooking time varies depending on the size of the sweet potato, but usually about an hour total, of which I spend maybe 5 minutes actually doing stuff. (Put potato in oven, smothered in olive oil; half an hour or so later put mushroom in oven, ditto; tomato sauce and beans go in microwave. It’s barely cooking at all.) Always nice, if not exactly mindblowing.

Friday: Spicy pork and tomato stew (adapted this recipe - great flavours, definitely worth doing the full-scale version in the future), with rice. Added some fennel, and used up the tinned tomatoes from Tuesday evening. Preparation took about 25 minutes, total cooking about 50 minutes. Damn good.

There’s some taleggio cheese in the fridge that needs to be used up soon. Hmmm…

Saturday: Risotto with wet (fresh) garlic and taleggio. Risotto is one of my favourite comfort foods (the weather has turned miserable and cold over the last week…), although nothing compares to mashed potato in that department. My favourite risotto in recent months has been sweet potato (taking over from fennel), but this works pretty well. NB, however: when I’ve used wet garlic in risotto previously, I’ve roasted it. This time I tried simply using it raw, as in this recipe (because I feel bad about putting the oven on just to roast a head of garlic, for crissakes…), but I don’t think it was as nice. Roasting the garlic first makes it sweeter and milder and although you then need a bit more of it, I think it gives a better flavour. Could have used parmesan rather than taleggio, but the latter gave it a creamier texture. (Rather like savoury rice pudding.)

Sunday: Farmers’ Market Day!! Which always leads to a dilemma: which of the bulging packs of dead animal to eat tonight?! I went for something I’ve only ever seen at this farmers market: venison liver. It’s gorgeous, and cheap. You don’t need to do much to it, but I have a bad habit of overcooking liver if I fry it, so this is what I do: brown each side for a couple of minute in the frying pan with a little oil, then take it out; put in some red wine or marsala or some such and reduce slightly, add a little liquid and flavouring (I usually go for something sweet like redcurrant jelly + something savoury like stock concentrate or soy sauce); then I put the liver back in the liquid to gently poach for a few more minutes, till it’s just a little pink in the middle (you don’t need much liquid - the liver is never completely submerged). Then I take it out for the last time and bung a spoonful or two of cream or creme fraiche into the sauce to make it creamy and unhealthy. Served with potatoes and purple sprouting broccoli (’tis the p.s.b. season - rejoice!), but rice, salad, etc, might work instead.

There is now a crazy amount of top-quality meat in the freezer, neatly divided into portions for use over the coming weeks. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without my freezer.

1. I didn’t always like cooking and I still get nervous about my cooking skills - especially when I have to cook for other people. Some things work and some things don’t; I’d like to keep some notes for reference in the future, eg, for the experiments that turn out much better than I’d expected, and for the things that didn’t quite come off and that I’ll want to adjust next time. And, of course, the ‘DON’T EVER TRY THAT AGAIN’ experiences.

2. I pick up a lot of online recipes and sometimes can’t track them down afterwards - I’d like to be able to find the good ones easily again. (And have some memory of what I did to them, since I rarely follow a recipe exactly.)

3. To show that it doesn’t take vast amounts of time, skill or fancy ingredients to produce tasty and interesting food.

Although they are boring in a slightly different way from how things used to be, according to the Graun:

The makers of Lloyd Grossman sauces have commissioned a survey which yields this depressing information: foodwise, most of us have around four staple meals, and that is pretty much all we cook. This means that we eat on average 2,960 portions of spaghetti bolognese in a lifetime, which is the equivalent of eating it every day for eight years. Other British staples that loom large are sausage and mash, chicken tikka masala and chilli con carne.

I appear to be doing better than that, anyway. The food diary for the last few days:

Wednesday: bought pizza (roast vegetables type thing). It was a busy evening. But you know, I do this maybe twice a month. It’s a treat for me.

Thursday: grilled fresh tuna; some kind of spinach and tomatoes mix (maybe like this; with spaghetti

Friday: this involved chorizo, tomatoes, penne (and possibly pesto) though I can’t remember what else or exactly how it went together

Saturday: spinach curry with haloumi (because I didn’t have any paneer and it seemed worth a try, and it was actually pretty good); with rice

Sunday: braised oxtail and carrots (plus 2 portions -> freezer); with potato