Szechuan Guai Wei Chicken

"Guai Wei", literally translated as "exotic/unusual/special flavour or taste", is one of main sauces used in Szechuan cuisine of China. The ingredients of "guai wei" usually consists of sesame, vinegar, Szechuan peppercorns, sugar, hot bean sauce and rice wine.

	Guaiwei Sauce
2 Chicken legs 3-5 slice Ginger 1 stalk Spring onion, sectioned 1/2 tsp Szechuan peppercorns 30 g Chinese rice wine 1 tbsp Sesame seeds, roasted 1 tbsp Spring onion, chopped	10 g Szechuan peppercorn oil 30 g Hot bean sauce 30 g Roasted sesame oil 20 g Sesame paste 10 g Black rice vinegar 15 g Maggi seasoning 10 g Sugar 5 g Chicken bouillon

1. Clean the chicken legs in warm water. Fill a pot with water over medium heat. When it starts to simmer, add in ginger, onion, Szechuan peppercorns and rice wine. Now add in prepared chicken thighs and cook for 12 minutes until just cooked and tender. Remove the chicken and soak in a pot of ice water until cool. Remove the chicken and cut into small pieces. Arrange the chicken on a serving plate.
   
2. Mix the Szechuan peppercorn oil, hot bean sauce, sesame oil, sesame paste, black vinegar, Maggi seasoning, and chicken bouillon in a bowl. Pour the dressing over the chicken, then sprinkle the roasted sesame seeds and chopped spring onions on top.

Polpo's courgette salad

I don't like courgettes. Not usually unless they are deep-fried and covered in salt. Otherwise, they are just water in fancy dress.

But this salad really makes the best of them and it is really very delicious. I pinched it off Polpo, which for those who don't know, is like a tapas-y style Venetian restaurant in Soho, which is very hip at the moment. Raw and cut into strips, the courgettes retain a meaty, interesting flavour that you kill almost immediately if you boil them.

And (although my photo is typically shit, I'm getting my other camera fixed soon, I promise) it looks pretty, if that's your thing.

The ingredients look quite unpromising, but altogether they make a very delicious thing, which is simple to assemble and everyone likes it.

Polpo's Courgette Salad for 2

1 large courgette
about 20 parmesan shavings (you could also use pecorino)
the juice of half-to-3/4 of a lemon
salt
the best quality olive oil you can get your hands on

1 Cut the courgette into strips using a speed peeler or a japanese mandolin

2 Put in a serving dish and pour over a few glugs of olive oil, the cheese, salt and lemon juice. Mix around to combine - it's easiest to do with your hands although you do get them totally covered in olive oil

This is really nice with something rich, maybe a rose veal chop, or chicken schnitzl.

Rabbit with yoghurt and mustard



Yikes, sorry - this is surely a competitor for all-time worst photo on Recipe Rifle


What with me being the size of a small South American country and liable to fall asleep at any second, my husband has been doing quite a lot of cooking.

You always get something a bit bonkers when he cooks. He'll set off for the shops with a cheery wave, planning to get a few simple ingredients for supper and, after returning two or three times because he's forgotten his keys, or his wallet, or his shoes, he'll make it to the shops and come back brandishing a pig's head, or a side of venison. Or, like the other day, some rabbit and pheasant.

More about the pheasant later, but with the rabbit he turned to Nigel Slater. That's what he does, my husband, he comes home with something weird and flicks through recipe books until he finds a thing to do with it. I, on the other hand, flick through recipe books and then go shopping for whatever it is I need. I'm not sure whose method is better. We're probably both idiots.

Anyway, I was a bit wary of the rabbit. I'm a bit wary of game in general. I don't like the occasionally pooey, ferrous tang much. But this was great. And not at all rubbery as rabbit can sometimes be. My husband claims this is from the resting.

So here we go - Nigel Slater uses cream, but we didn't have any so we used yoghurt (a danger of reading recipes post-shopping), but it was delicious anyway. Using cream would have resulted in a "longer" sauce, but I thought the yoghurt added an interesting tartness to everything. Either is good. You can also do this with chicken. I mean, not instead of the yoghurt, instead of the rabbit.

4 rabbit joints (we ended up using boned rabbit chunks from Waitrose that were reduced)
3 cloves garlic
2 tbsp French mustard - one of Dijon and one of grainy if you can
olive oil
about 150ml of yoghurt or cream

1 Mash together the garlic and mustard with some salt and pepper. Stir in olive oil to make a thin paste (about 2/3 glugs). Rub the mixture over your rabbit.

2 Place in a shallow baking dish, drizzle over some more oil and bake at 190C for about 25mins.

3 Take the dish out of the oven and pour off most of the oil. Tip the yoghurt/cream over the rabbit and shift it all around so it's evenly coated. Bake for another 20 mins.

We ate this with buttered noodles. Then my husband went to play Fives and I watched 3 episodes of House back to back and painted my nails.

Spicy Fish Sticks

Homemade fish sticks are one of my favourites. They are crunchy, spicy and delicious! If you can't take hot food, then skip the step of preparing chilli sauce and make a tartar or remoulade instead to accompany these fish sticks.

	Sauce
2 Cod fillets Salt and white pepper to taste 3 Garlic cloves, chopped 1 Chilli, seeded and chopped 1 stalk Spring onion, chopped 2 tbsp Sweet potato flour Vegetable oil Handful of arugula to serve	1 tsp Szechuan pepper powder 1 tbsp Chilli oil 1 tbsp Rice wine 1 tbsp Light soya sauce 1 tsp Roasted sesame oil

1. Rinse and pat the fish fillets dry with kitchen paper. Slice the fillets into 3-inch strips. Lightly season with salt and pepper. Dredge the fish strips to coat with sweet potato flour.
   
2. Fill a deep skillet half full with oil and heat to 150C/300F. Lower the prepared fish strips and fry until lightly golden. Increase the temperature to 200C/400F and fry for a further 5 seconds. Remove and drain.
   
3. Leave a little bit of oil in the skillet and stir in chopped garlic, chilli, spring onion and all the ingredients of the sauce. Return the fish strips to the skillet and gently stir to combine. Serve them on a bed of arugula.

Chicken liver pate

Why does everyone go on about how much they hate January? I love January. It's my favourite month. There are so few expectations of joy and happiness that I, personally, love it. I can be as depressed as I like. No-one invites you out for dinner, or to a party, or anything. It's great!

And I always find the run-up to Christmas a tiny bit like the run-up to the end of the world. Quick, quick, quick... got to get everything done by this looming deadline. And you hold your breath and do it all and sort of expect the sky to fall on your head.  But then January 2 and 3 and 4 roll around in the usual fashion and you feel like you've been given a second chance at life.

My mistake in the past with January has been to leave Christmas decorations up. Now I take them down with great relish - all of them - on January 2. I throw away the cards, put everything else in a cardboard box, stash it away and forget it ever happened. And this year, we bought a living tree so we don't even have that sad throw-out-the-tree-carcass moment. It's just been moved outside in its little pot for next year.

My next move will be to go out and buy a lot of hyacinths, which I will do just after I've finished writing this and just before I go out and get a flu jab. My mother, who usually sounds surprised to hear from me when I ring, like: "Oh yeah! I thought there was another child somewhere. Which one are you again?", has gone mad and rung me every day for the past week asking if I've had my shot yet because she's worried about the baby. Not about ME, you'll notice.

Anyway, hyacinths are a key element to feeling good about January, if for some MENTAL reason you don't already feel good about it. Go and get some with your remaining pennies that you have not spent on cheap tat and mulled wine.

And then cook something frugal! Like this chicken liver pate. Easy peasy and very cheap.

In its most basic form, chicken liver pate is chicken livers cooked and then pulverised with melted butter and seasoned. That's it. (That's why it's always a starter in restaurants, because each serving costs the rezzy 50p to make, max, and then they flog it to you for £7.95).

Any extra seaonings besides salt and pepper are up to personal imagination. Below is a list of the stuff I usually put in my pate, but you can add extra things (mace? MUSTARD?) or leave things out if you don't like them/haven't got them.

1 400g packet chicken livers - I get mine from Waitrose, obviously
About 180g butter
3 shallots, chopped
salt
pepper
some thyme - 2 sprigs, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic
some brandy, about 2 glugs
some sage - 5 leaves, roughly chopped

1 Wash and sort through your chicken livers for any green or grey bits, which are gall bladder and will make you fucking gag and ruin the whole thing if any gets in your pate. Err on the side of caution and snip out anything that looks even vaguely suspect.

Heat some veg oil in a pan and gently cook your livers for about 4-5 minutes, turning often. You're looking for brown on the outside and pink on the inside - but not red. Snip the livers in half if that makes it more manageable. If you're a bit squeamish about offal, cook them for longer, bearing in mind that the longer you cook them, the more grainy your pate will be.

2 Sling your livers in a food processor and then fry the onions, garlic and any herbs you want together in the same pan on a very low heat for a good 10-15 mins. If you want a really garlicky pate, keep back one garlic clove and chuck it in raw later.

3 While this is happening, melt the butter - about 180g. Yeah, it is quite a lot. I've never really been able to get the hang of clarifying butter, but in theory if you melt it really slowly what ought to happen is that the clear part of the butter floats to the top and the milky part of the butter sinks to the bottom. That much butter takes about 10-15 mins to melt.

4 Once the onions and garlic are done, add them to the livers in the food processor. Then pour about 2 tablespoonfuls of brandy into your pan and turn up the heat to full bongoes. Cook this down and scrape at the bottom of the pan to get all the gack off and swizzle it into the brandy for about 2-3 minutes and then add it to the food mixer. Chase this with about 2 tablespoons of your melted butter. If you want it garlicky, add your raw garlic clove now.

5 Whizz all this up. Taste. Season. You will need quite a lot of salt, about two or three big pinches, and about 8-10 turns of the pepper grinder. It is normal for warm, pulverised chicken livers to smell a bit scary and pungent. You may wonder just what kind of hellish mess I've got you into. Fear not, when chilled this horrifying mixture will be unscary and tasty.

6 I like my pate quite rustic and don't mind the odd corner of onion, but if you'd like yours more of a smooth parfait, pass it through a sieve. This is messy and annoying and quite tough on the old triceps, but it's what you have to do. Decant, seal with a layer of melted butter and chill. If you're feeling artistic, gently press a sage leaf into your clarified butter lid.

My advice is to decant the pate into a number of small ramekins and top each with a layer of butter, rather than putting the whole thing into a large container, so that you can use one small ramekin of pate at a time and still have some fresh in the fridge, rather than feeling under pressure to eat a huge cereal-bowl-sized wodge of pate at one sitting.

Eat with toast and cornichons, while pretending that the letter from the bank about your overdraft that you just threw in the bin in fact got lost in the post.

Keeps for about 10 days (butter-seal unbroken) in the fridge.

I hate macaroons



Just marvel at how shit these are


A lot of you have been bothering me about macaroons - for months. How can you make them? What's the best recipe? The best method?

And my answer to you individually has always been: BUY THEM FROM A FUCKING SHOP. Because there some things that you ought to buy from a shop - turkish delight is one of them and the other one is macaroons. I'm sure there are other things. Croissants. Cheese. Gelatine.

The problem, people, is sugar. Sugar is hard to work with and although as a general rule I am quite disdainful of those who think that cooking is complicated, there are people who train for, like, days to become pastry chefs and chocolatiers. And when they come to make things like macaroons they have all the right kit - sugar thermometers and icing bags and silicon trays and special ovens and flavourings and all that shite that one doesn't neccessarily have in a domestic kitchen.

So I'd always say: buy them from a shop. They are a treat. They are not humble home-cooked fare - they are multi-flavoured, layered and coloured, designed for precious fashion gizmos and fizzy PR girls to send to each other and squeal over. They are not for the likes of you and me to knock up on a lazy afternoon.

But you're all such nags. Maybe you ought to give that up for January, yeah? Leave a poor pregnant girl alone. But despite making me hate you, the endless, endless pestering and nagging worked because like a chump I ordered some instant macaroon mix from some online shop and gave them a go. After all, not everyone, I reasoned, lives near a Laduree concession stand.

And it was, genuinely, the most boring and disappointing experience of my brief cooking career. Sometimes things that are a bit of a faff are worth making because they are, at the same time, fun and they work. But these things were both not fun to make and didn't work. I mean just look at them - cracked, discoloured, thin, wonky. Crap. CRAP!

Some of it was my fault (the whisk attachment on my food processor broke; I don't have an icing bag) but some of it was also the instant mix's fault (they didn't specify enough water but when I added more I added too much and it went sloppy; the food colourings I bought from the same online shop were cack and dull and actually came with a warning on the label that they might have "an adverse effect on attention and behaviour in children").

However the flavour was just excellent, as industrially-processed things containing Guar Gum, Silicon Dioxide, Lactic Acid Esters of Mono- and Di-glycerides of Fatty Acids usually are. So if you think you can do better than me, instant macaroon mix is available here.

Anyway, after that disaster I thought no more about the whole thing and wasn't even going to bother writing about them, until I had a nightmare last night about macaroons. It went on for ages - it really did. Don't tell me that in actual fact it only went on for three seconds or whatever, because I kept being woken up by my husband dithering about listening to the cricket and whenever I went back to sleep I'd still be dreaming about bloody macaroons. So it's a sign. I'm going to have to make them and master them. That, it seems, is my curse. Luckily I've found a couple of straightforward enough-looking recipes to have a go at. All I need is an icing bag. And some food colouring that isn't POISONOUS.

I hope your Christmas and New Year were okay and if you're back at work, I'm sorry. I don't even have a job and I'm depressed as hell that the holidays are over.

I was ill throughout all festivities. The highlight was when my husband got incredibly drunk on New Year and dived into the shallow end of a swimming pool and scraped his nose on the bottom and now he looks like he's been in a fight.

The next morning, (I was asleep at the time of the incident), I said: "Ha ha, you're such a dick" - and variations on that theme - throughout breakfast, until someone else said "My God - you could have broken your neck!"

I looked at my husband and felt more strongly than ever that my marriage is like an episode of The Inbetweeners - except that we are both that posh know-it-all one.

Avocado Mashed Potatoes with Caramelized Garlic

The avocado gives this mashed potato dish extra taste and creaminess, and increases the nutritional value of the dish. The caramelized garlic cloves do the trick and give the dish a real punch!
Recipe adapted from Essen&Trinken--Kartoffel Avocadopüree mit Knoblauchkaramell.

• 20 g Sugar
  
• 20 g Butter
  
• 10 Garlic cloves, peeled
  
• 300 g Potatoes, peeled and diced
  
• 80 ml Milk
  
• Salt and black pepper
  
• 1 Ripe avocado
  
• 1 tsp Lemon juice
  
• 50 g Wholemilk yogurt
  
• 2 tbsp Curly parsley, chopped

1. Caramelize the sugar in a small skillet over medium heat until golden brown. Add in butter and garlic cloves. Cook until the garlic cloves turned a beautiful golden brown.
   
2. Place diced potatoes and 1/3 teaspoon of salt in a large pot. Fill with encough water to cover the potatoes. Bring it to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for about 20 minutes until cooked through. Drain.
   
3. Half the avocado and scoop out the flesh and place in a large bowl along with lemon juice, yogurt, salt and pepper. Reserve the avocado shells. Use an immersion blender to puree the mixture until smooth.
   
4. Warm the milk in a pot over the low heat. Mash the drained potatoes through a sieve into the hot milk. Remove, then add in avocado puree and chopped curly parsley. Warm up the mixture over the low heat. Season with salt and pepper. Fill the avocado shells with potato puree, and top with some caramelized garlic cloves.