Tonkatsu

Tonkatsu (or breaded and fried pork) is a favourite in our house, as is the chicken version, which we just call "katsu". Here's the recipe for the tonkatsu and a sauce to go with it. I always shallow fry my katsu but you can deep fry them at around 350 degrees fahrenheit. If you want to use chicken instead of pork, follow the same recipe as below but use boneless skinless chicken breasts or thighs.

Serves 2:
Tonkatsu:
2 pork loins or cutlets
1 cup of plain flour
1 egg, beaten until combined
100g Panko breadcrumbs, or any Japanese style flaky breadcrumbs
Half a cup of cooking oil

For the sauce:
1/4 cup dark soy sauce
1/4 cup regular soy sauce
1/4 cup worcestershire sauce
3/4 cup tomato ketchup
Method: Add all of the above ingredients to a bowl, whisk together until the texture thickens slightly. Taste and adjust with ingredients above until it is to your liking

Tonkatsu cooking method:
1. Remove any excess hard fat and rind from the pork loin or cutlet. Cut along the remaining fat on the outside and inside of the pork to ensure it isn't chewy when cooked.
2. Place the pork between two pieces of cling film and bash with a rolling pin until around 2 cms thick.
3. Put the flour on a plate and dredge the pork in the flour, ensuring they are evenly coated. Shake off any excess flour and dip the pork into the beaten egg. Leave for a few seconds to soak and then remove any excess. Finally, dredge the pork into the breadcrumbs. Use your fingers to really get the breadcrumbs onto the pork - they really need to stick. Leave to stand for a few minutes.
4. While the pork is resting, heat the oil in a frying pan on a medium to high heat. You can check the temperate of the oil by dropping in a few leftover breadcrumbs. If they sizzle, it's time to add the pork.
5. Cook the pork for a few minutes on either side until golden brown. If they start to colour too much, turn down the heat. Once fully cooked, remove from the pan and leave to rest of a wire rack. If you're in doubt as to whether they're fully cooked or not, cut the tonkatsu at the thickest part of the meat to check.
6. Once the tonkatsu has been drained of any excess oil, place on a plate and cut into approx. one inch thick strips. It's ready to munch!

I serve mine with steamed jasmine rice and the sauce as desribed above. Here's the finished article!

Dinner for one

I found myself alone in the house on Friday night. I don't particularly like being alone, but my partner had his Christmas work "do". Whenever I am eating alone I decide to literally make a meal of it. I think eating alone doesn't resign the diner to something boring. It can still be a good meal, especially if accompanied by a glass of wine!

Therefore on Friday night I decided to go a bit "Nigella" and do a pancetta salad with a dijon mustard dressing and parmesan. The recipe is on the Food Network website: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/nigella-lawson/mixed-greens-with-pancetta-and-shaved-parmesan-recipe/index.html

This salad was so delicious - richly savoury and at the same time very fresh and light. As you can see the parmesan cheese on top was a bit of overkill - but it was Friday night!

Cheese and tomatoes

I'm a great believer in the saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Just such an example of this is my Dad's grilled cheese and tomatoes. My Dad used to work quite late so my mum, my sister and I often had our evening meal before he got home. When he came back, no doubt he was ravenous, and he grabbed ingredients which needed little time to cook but provided instant gratification. His absolute favourite was grilled cheese and tomatoes. He had a battered old oven proof dish which he would fill with sliced cheese (usually cheddar, and he didn't bother to grate it), sliced tomatoes, and a dash of white pepper. It would go under the grill until the cheese melted and became golden on the surface. He used to eat this straight from the little dish it was cooked in (saves on the washing up!) alongside a nice chunk of bread.

I remember the smell of this cheese and tomato feast wafting upstairs. I would often go downstairs and sit with my Dad while he ate. He would let me dunk some of the bread into the melting cheese, and I just remember how heavenly it was. It was perfectly simple family food. Something to share (although I presume his intention was to eat it himself - and quite rightly!)

My plan is to make this for Christmas Eve lunch, just as I am settling into the relaxation and indulgence of Christmas. It requires so little effort, and so few ingredients, but its rewards are great.

Beef stew - the ultimate in winter comfort food

Beef stew (or hotpot) has always been to me family food, and by that definition, a comfort food. In my childhood I remember my favourite meals being stews or hotpots. My absolute favourites were beef stew (the ultimate), a chicken hotpot with a shortcrust pastry topping, and a rather obscure and alarmingly simple casserole of potatoes and bacon cooked in milk. It sounds hideous, and maybe it was, but I can promise you it tasted good!

For my beef stew, I use a very basic recipe and jazz it up slightly with a few nifty additions (namely pancetta and red wine). The vegetables in my version are really embarrassingly simple: onion, carrot and potato. Of course you could use anything you wish - the joy of this is in its lack of precision. It really is "throw it in the dish" food.

I use a method similar to the one I use for coq au vin - that is that I brown off the main ingredients before transferring them to a casserole dish with a tight fitting lid. I then make a simplified version of a roux (and a much easier version, I might add). I put the casserole into a low oven for as many hours as I can stand to wait. In that sense its fairly low effort - your main challenge will be keeping your mitts off the food. I often feign concern around 3 quarters of the way through cooking. "What if it doesn't taste good?" I ask myself. "I'd better check it - don't want anyone to get food poisoning. Oh yes, it is nice, I'll just have a bit more". It really is a downward spiral. Once the time comes to eat it though, it is worth the wait, especially if served in a giant homemade Yorkshire pudding (no one said this was gourmet food...)

NB. I'm using US measurements here because that way its more about proportions than actual figures - you use the proportions here to cook for any number of people, and stews are great for feeding large numbers of people (especially with the aforementioned Yorkie Pud to bulk it out).

Ingredients:
2 cups cubed beef chuck (may be described as stewing or braising steak), lightly coated in a little plain white flour
1 cup white onion, chopped into eighths (it'll break down over the hours of cooking)
1 packet pancetta slices, sliced into yet smaller pieces
1 cup red wine
2 cups beef stock, just below boiling point
2 large all purpose potatoes, thickly sliced.
1 large carrot, thickly sliced
1 tablespoon olive oil
Salt and pepper
1 tablespoon plain flour
You'll also need: a slotted spoon, a casserole dish with a tight fitting lid, and a frying pan

Method:

1. Add the sliced pancetta to a frying pan and cook on a gentle heat. As the pancetta cooks it will impart the pan with fat which you can use to brown off the rest of the ingredients. Use a slotted spoon to drain the pancetta and add to the casserole dish.

2. Add the chopped onion to the pan and cook until it starts to brown ever so slightly. Again use the slotted spoon to remove the onions from the pan and put them in the casserole dish, leaving the fat in the pan still. 

3. Add the cubed beef to the pan and fry until browned and add to the pan. The pan will probably get very dry at this point as the flour on the beef will soak up the oil. Drain off any excess fat and add to the casserole dish.

4.  Don't bother to brown the poatoes and the carrots, just layer them with the rest of the ingredients in the casserole dish.

5. Season well with pepper, and only lightly with salt. The pancetta is salty.

6. Put your flour in a bowl and pour in the remaining oil from the pan (if there is loads left over just add about a tablespoon). Mix together to make a smooth paste. Gradually add the hot beef stock until you have a sauce (it will continue to thicken up as it cooks so don't worry if it's not too thick at this point - in fact you want it to still be quite loose at this stage). Add the wine to the beef stock mix and pour it into the casserole. The liquid should reach just above the other ingredients (you can see from the picture below it does cook down slightly which is nothing to worry about). If you don't seem to have enough liquid, top it up with boiling water.

7. Cover the casserole with the lid and put on a baking tray. Put the baking tray in the oven and cook for as long as possible (ideally 4 hours) on around 130 degrees celsius. I usually cook it on 150 degrees for the first two hours, then reduce to 120 degrees for the other two hours.

The above picture is the finished article. I check it for seasoning, and at this point you may want to add more salt to taste. A good sprinkling of fresh herbs wouldn't go amiss either, but I like to have it just like this. 

Weekday Favourites - Salmon and Couscous

My partner is a really good cook and one of his absolute best recipes is for pan fried salmon fillet. I'm really terrible at cooking salmon on the stove top - I can't seem to get the balance between succulent flesh and crispy, almost caramelised surface. I'm very lucky in that I have someone to cook it for me, just the way I like. Although the salmon is cooked skin-on, we tend not to eat the skin, although if it is crispy enough it can be perfectly edible. I just find it can be difficult to get the skin just right, and when I'm tired and hungry, I'm really not remotely bothered about the skin.

This salmon was seasoned very simply with just salt and freshly ground black pepper. You could add any seasonings or spices to it. Cajun salmon is wonderful, and I really like paprika with it. My partner cooks the salmon skin side down in a hot pan. It should sizzle as soon as the fish hits the pan. You can add some oil to the pan first, or rub the fish with oil and add that to a dry pan. Either way should work just fine. Most of the cooking time takes place on the skin side - as it cooks you'll see the flesh turn from the raw coral to a beautiful soft pink. Once the flesh is cooked three quarters of the way up the salmon, flip it over to cook the top side of the fillet. As we won't be eating the skin, my partner makes sure he gets lots of flavour into this side of the fish. He adds a knob of butter to the pan, to baste the skin side of the fish, to keep it moist. Meanwhile the butter on the surface of the pan cooks the non-skin side, caramelising it and creating a "crust". Once basted and cooked all the way through, my partner removes the skin - it should slip off with very little difficulty. If you are having trouble removing the skin the salmon may not yet be fully cooked.

If you have to prepare the rest of the meal at this point, cloak the fillets in some foil to keep them warm. We love to eat salmon with couscous. I like the contrast of the sweet salmon and the savoury couscous. I really like the textures as well. I'll do a recipe for this another time, but the basic principle is to cook the couscous according to the packet instructions, and then add salt and pepper, a squeeze of lemon, finely chopped red onion or spring onion, and finely chopped sundried tomatoes.

My partner served the salmon fillet and couscous with a mixed leaf and fresh herb salad. We opt for the lazy option and buy a packet from the supermarket. We add fresh chopped tomatoes to liven it up a bit. You can make a dressing to go with this but I love it with a bit of the salmony butter straight from the pan.

It's my favourite weekday tea: it takes about 15 minutes to make, it's fresh, colourful and vibrant and really, really tasty.

The quality of this picture can only be described as shoddy, but I was in such a hurry to shovel it into my mouth, I really couldn't bring myself to be professional! You may notice I've already made a start on the salmon!

Speaking of salmon, it's also a proper weekend meal. My partner made salmon cooked in exactly the same way as above, but with homemade oven baked French "fries", a dressed green salad and some really good quality mayonnaise (not homemade - a Friday night in our household involves drinking wine, not slaving over homemade egg-based sauces). This was delicious and a more indulgent way of eating salmon.

Spice, sausages and pasta - could it really be bad?

Jamie Oliver strikes again with a fantastically simple pasta dish. The key here is to buy the best sausages you can lay your mitts on – think coarse meat, good seasoning and a high meat content. The cheaper the sausage, the less likely you are to get the texture needed here. You could also use pork mince here, as in fact what you will be using is the sausage meat, without the skin. You need to disgard the skin before cooking in order to break the meat up.   So if you would prefer to make your own sausage meat, go right ahead. I used shop-bought organisc sausages and de-skinned them. 

The de-skinned sausage meat is added to a heated pan with a splash of olive oil. It is then broken up with a wooden spoon, until it resembles coarsely chopped mince meat. Once adequately squished, fennel seeds and dried chillis are added. I used a sufficiently fiery birds eye chilli (3 of them to be precise) and a teaspoon of fennel seeds. Bash them together, either in a pestle and mortar or in bowl using the business end of a rolling pin (my preferred method). Throw them in the pan and continue to stir and bash at the mince until it becomes even more mince-like. Cook on a medium heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally so the meat has a chance to brown and crisp up. Once it looks really well broken down, golden and caramelised, chuck in a glass of white wine, a pinch of dried oregano, and let that cook down slightly until half of the liquid has evaporated. Use a full-bodied white wine or you won’t taste it in the finished dish. Once cooked down, grate in some lemon zest and add the juice of half the lemon. 

The above picture shows the sausage meat after 15 minutes in the pan. Wine has been added and allowed to reduce until only a intensely savoury puddle remains. Be sure to taste it at this point - not for any other reason than it is utterly delicious.

Leave this to cook on the lowest heat, and boil your fusili. I used fresh, shop-bought pasta and cooked it for 3.5 minutes on a high heat, with a splash of olive oil and a pinch of salt added to the water. Once cooked, scoop out a small cup of the pasta cooking water. Drain the pasta and throw it i the pan with the sausage meat mixture. Add a cup of grated parmesan cheese, a knob of butter, ground black pepper, a handful of freshly chopped parsley, and the pasta cooking water. The cooking water contains starch from the pasta, and this is what helps the sausage mixture stick to the pasta. Serve with fresh parmesan shavings on top, and a bit more chopped parsley.

My partner has told me that this is his new favourite pasta dish. The great thing is it's so easy to make and once you had a stock of the herbs, chillis and larder products needed for this, individual servings will be cheap and cheerful. I won't deny this isn't calorie-laden, but it's comforting and delicious, and sometimes that's the nourishment we need. I recommend eating this from a bowl whilst swathed in a warm duvet. The full ingredients list and recipe can be found on Jamie Oliver's recipe: http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/pasta-recipes/proper-blokes-sausage-fusilli