2 egg yolks
salt and pepper
For the cheese sauce, stud the onion with the cloves and put it in a pan with the milk, bay leaves and black peppercorns. Bring the milk to the boil, take the pan off the heat and set aside for 20 minutes to allow the flavours to infuse.
Meanwhile, get cracking on the tomato sauce. Heat the oil in a medium-sized pan and add the onion. Cook for a few minutes until softened then add the garlic and cook for 5 minutes more, taking care the contents of the pan don’t brown. Add the tomatoes and sugar and simmer gently for 15–20 minutes, stirring now and then, until reduced and thickened. Squeeze in the lemon juice, add some salt and pepper and spoon the sauce over the base of a rectangular, ovenproof dish (around 30cm x 20cm and 5cm deep) in which the cannelloni will fit side by side in two parallel rows.
For the cannelloni filling, mix the crabmeat together with the lemon juice, lemon oil, cayenne pepper and salt and pepper. Finally, stir through the basil.
Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil. Drop in the sheets of lasagne one at a time and leave in there for 5 minutes. (I know fresh pasta is supposed to be ‘ready-to-roll’, as it were, but it can often be a bit stiff. Here, you want to be sure the sheets are floppy and pliable, especially as they are encasing the deliciously delicate crab.) Drain the pasta well, place the sheets side by side on a large piece of clingfilm and leave to cool. Spoon some of the crab filling along one short edge of each sheet and roll up. Arrange the cannelloni seam-side down on top of the tomato sauce. Preheat the oven to 200°C/Gas Mark 6. Bring the milk back to the boil, then strain it into a jug. Melt the butter in a pan, add the flour and cook over a medium heat for 1 minute. Gradually beat in the milk and bring it to the boil, stirring, then leave to simmer very gently over a low heat for 5 minutes, giving it a stir every now and then. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cream, 120g of the cheese, the egg yolks and salt and pepper to taste. Pour the cheese sauce over the cannelloni, sprinkle over the rest of the cheese and bake for 30 minutes until golden. Serve with a salad and maybe some bread.
Mini Pavlovas with Passion Fruit Curd and Cream (#ulink_4ec1a9f0-8a03-5166-b710-5d27f997b2f7)
The trick to choosing good passion fruit is to select those that are really wrinkly (sometimes looks can be deceptive), as these will yield the most juice and the sweetest pulp.
Serves six, but four people may find it more than easy to polish them off.
3 egg whites
a very small pinch of salt
175g caster sugar
1 teaspoon cornflour
½ teaspoon white wine vinegar
For the topping:
300ml double cream
6 tablespoons passion fruit curd (or lemon, if you can’t get it)
6 large passion fruit
Preheat the oven to 140°C/Gas Mark 1. Lightly grease a large baking tray and line with a sheet of non-stick baking paper.
Put the egg whites into a large, dry mixing bowl, add the salt and whisk with a hand-held electric mixer until the eggs form stiff peaks. Whisk in the sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time, to make a very stiff, glossy meringue. Whisk in the cornflour and vinegar.
Drop 6 even-sized spoonfuls of the mixture onto the prepared baking sheet, well spaced apart, and flatten them slightly with the back of the spoon, making a small dip in the centre. Bake for 45 minutes then turn off the oven and leave them inside to go cold – this will stop them cracking and collapsing.
Just before serving, whip the cream in a bowl into soft peaks and cut the passion fruits in half. Randomly spoon the curd over the whipped cream in the bowl and, as you spoon it out on top of each pavlova, swirl together briefly. Finish each pavlova with a scoop of passion fruit pulp and scoff.
Autumn and winter (#ulink_bd63fd2e-20d7-5f60-89c8-3c2c78a24225)
Sunday lunch during the colder months means one thing to me: comfort. The sweet waft of parsnips roasting in the oven, the burnished, crunchy skins of the roast potatoes, and the wine-infused gravy bubbling away on the stove all calm and reassure and make me feel half-ready to face whatever a freezing Monday morning in January might throw at me. Most wonderfully, the cold months bring forth the perfect vegetables to wrap us up in warmth: just as our longing for salady lightness evaporates, we are provided with the likes of celeriac to mash with cream and potatoes, squashes to roast and various cabbages to provide a healthy punch of hot nutrition. And then, of course, there are all those gloriously homely winter puddings to think of …
A simple Sunday
These recipes are intended for two: a tired two. Perhaps two people who are a little jaded; maybe feeling a bit sick of the Christmas and New Year party overload; who want – no, need – clean, restorative, health-giving, but undemanding, food. However, this could also serve four – just double up the veg and the pudding.
The chicken dish is the sort of food that medieval toothless peasants might have had bubbling away regularly over their fires but that we, with our overdeveloped taste for reductions and contrast of flavours, and, well, our many teeth, hardly ever eat. Which is a shame really, as this dish is good for all kinds of reasons: not only is it healthy, but it also requires very little labour – if you want, you can stagger out of bed at any hour you please, assemble it, pop it on the lowest heat and go back to bed until next Christmas. Not only that, but the leftovers provide two more meals for the two of you, which, in a month that brings both a longing for rest and a desire to tighten the belt (both physically as well as financially), is probably just what you are after.
Finishing off the meal, the baked apples offer a way of using up the Christmas mincemeat in a way that will neither break the bank nor bring on the bloat.
JANUARY CHICKEN (#ulink_91b4d26a-0847-5e74-91d4-e2260961b262)
STIR-FRIED PAK CHOI WITH SESAME SEEDS (#ulink_da8f96b7-1579-526b-8908-8282d9e4cc19)
MINCEMEAT-STUFFED BAKED APPLES (#ulink_67de70a9-c532-511d-abf3-d9cf2ecb0f87)
January Chicken (#ulink_bd63fd2e-20d7-5f60-89c8-3c2c78a24225)
NOTE: You will require a big, cauldron-like pan to make this. You may think you don’t need one but, believe me, you do; especially if you really like cooking but hate all the sloshing about that occurs when you haven’t got a big enough pan. I have two such cauldrons: one medium and one massive, which seems to be designed for a tall witch with really strong arms. I used the medium-sized one for this chicken recipe.
1 small organic or free-range chicken (mine was 1.5kg)
2 medium onions, peeled and quartered
4 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
3 medium carrots, peeled and chopped into 2cm chunks
2 leeks, cleaned and chopped into 2cm chunks
1 litre water
3 bay leaves
½ lemon
4 teaspoons sweet white miso paste
salt and pepper
Put all the ingredients, bar the miso paste, in your ‘witching’ pan. Without the option of a lie-in – it being a church day – I put my brew on the lowest setting on the top of the stove. It went on at 9.30am and then I dashed out of the door, worrying I would spend the whole of the sermon praying against a house fire. Anyway, all was well. I got home at 12 and the chicken was still not fully cooked. So I turned up the heat for 30 minutes, adding the miso at this point and testing for seasoning. I had to turn it down to its lowest heat again when the phone rang, but nothing spoilt. We ate at about one o’clock.
Basically, this is a dish that could never, in a million years, be accused of being sophisticated (it’s about as sophisticated as drinking warm milk at Grandma’s kitchen table), but sometimes that’s exactly where you want to be. Anyway, I removed the bird from the cauldron, chopped off the legs and served them on a base of half of the stocky slush (made during the cooking of the chicken, water and vegetables), with some pak choi on the side. For the Vicar, this last bit was a healthy step too far.
Here are some thrifty ideas for using up the leftovers:
Chicken Soup
Pull the rest of the meat off the carcass and add to the remainder of the vegetables and liquid left in the pan. Reheat and blitz in a food processor or liquidiser, or use a hand-held number until it is soupy. If the result is too thick, add some boiling water to thin it down a bit. What you’ll get is a softly spoken soup that serves two, with seconds.
Light and Lazy Stock
I nearly didn’t bother making a stock from the bones of this bird; after all, it had already been sitting in liquid, bubbling away, for 3 hours. But I did decide to do it after all, but to make it simple. So I half heartedly chucked the carcass in the pan, didn’t bother with vegetables, nor bay leaves, filled up the big pan it was in with 2 litres of water and let it come to the boil and then simmer for a few hours. It was worth it: it wasn’t the richest of stocks, but it was still good enough to use in another light broth or a risotto. I was left feeling like a virtuously thrifty wartime housewife. My grandmother would have been proud.