Coq Au Vin

It's cold, wet and windy. My sister and her boys have come to visit for the weekend and bravely set off in the drizzle for a trip to Covent Garden. We have a vote on tonight's tea before they leave and as soon as the door shuts, we bolt it. The heating clicks back on, Scooby Doo comes on telly waving a pair of maracas and dancing to Mexican music and the house fills with the waft of a gently bubbling stew.
I love a wet weekend.

Serves 4 grown-ups and 3 children
large chorizo sausage or piece of good smoked pancetta, cubed (I used bit of both)
2 tbsp plain flour
1 bottle of light red wine
18 chicken thighs and drums (3 each for grown ups, 2 each for kids), skinned
12 or so shallots, peeled
6 garlic cloves, chopped
1 celery stick, thinly sliced
2 tsp smoked paprika
bunch fresh thyme and/or sage, chopped
500g chestnut mushrooms
1 tbsp chopped fresh tarragon or 3 of parsley
mash and steam vegetables, to serve

Put the chorizo and/or pancetta in a very large pan and turn on the heat. As it starts to sizzle, it should release enough oil for you to add the flour to the pan. Cook the flour in the fat for 5 minutes then pour in the wine.

Add the chicken, whole shallots, garlic, celery, paprika and thyme. And salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, almost cover with the pan lid, just leaving a centimeter or so uncovered then simmer on the lowest heat for 3 or more hours. Add the mushrooms for the last 30 minutes. Stir in the tarragon or parsley.

Fergal's Irish Stew

We're staying over at our friends tonight and Fergal is making his famous Irish stew. It's a variation on a Ballymaloe recipe. This is how you do it:

Serves 6
1.5kg cubed lamb
2kg potatoes, cubed
750g carrots, cut into chunky pieces
4 onions, cut into chunky pieces
1 large swede, cubed
few sprigs of fresh thyme
3 litres or so of fresh lamb stock
chopped fresh parsley

1 Trim the excess fat off the lamb and cook in a large cassrole dish to melt the fat. Lift out the solids and discard. Add the lamb cubes and cook for a couple of minutes to seal. Lift out the meat.

2 Layer the vegetables and the lamb back into the pan ensuring an even distribution and seasoning with salt, pepper and thyme as you go. Pour over enough stock to cover then bring up to the boil, cover and simmer for a couple of hours.

3 Skim off any excess fat from the surface. Stir in the parsley, check the seasoning then ladle into bowls and serve.

Pot-Roasted Lamb Shanks

Most of us do slow-cooked lamb shanks the same way, in red wine with herbs and onions. That's because it works so well and some matches are just meant to be. Like crackling'd roast pork and Bramley apple sauce. Like sausages and HP. Like......

Serves 2
2 lamb shanks
2 rashers smoked streaky bacon, chopped
3 carrots, chunked
2 red onions, sliced
2 garlic cloves, chopped
few sprigs of rosemary or thyme
few juniper or allspice berries
2 tsp sweetness: brown sugar, honey, redcurrant jelly
1/3 bottle red wine
glass of water
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Preheat the oven to 160C. Place all of the ingredients (except vinegar) in a casserole dish, cover and roast for 3 hours or so. Take the lid off for the last half hour if it's too liquidy for you. I like to balance it out with a bit of vinegar at the end.
Serve with mash.

Cowboy Dinner

We eat a lot of pork and a lot of beans in Landcroft House. Probably because I keep a bag of dried beans in the cupboard and some ribs in the freezer at all times and I get fed up of going shopping. When the fridge is empty and I can’t face a trawl round Sainsbury’s, this is often what turns up on the table for tea.

Serves 4
300g dried black (or other) beans, soaked overnight
1 tbsp olive oil
1 onion finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 red chillies finely chopped
500g pork ribs
2 tsp smoked paprika
1 kallo organic stock cube
few fresh herb sprigs, eg rosemary, thyme, oregano
1 tbsp vinegar, any will do

Drain the beans and place in pan with cold water. Bring to the boil and bubble rapidly for 15 minutes.

Meanwhille, heat the oil in flameproof casserole and cook the onion garlic and chillies for 10 minutes until softened and golden. Preheat the oven to 140C.

Drain the beans and add to the pan along with the ribs and paprika. Cover with water, add the stock cube and herbs, cover with a lid. Place in the oven for as many hours as you can, but at least 3. Season with salt, pepper and vinegar. I serve with greens on the side.

Red-hot black bean chilli

Half way through the cooking time

Serves 4
200g dried black beans or cannellini beans
1 tbsp sunflower oil
1 large red onion, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
4 garlic cloves, chopped
2 – 6 hot chillies, chopped
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp smoked paprika
600g braising or stewing steak, diced
400g can chopped tomatoes
300ml chicken stock
1 square of dark chocolate (I used a chunk of Green & Blacks Maya Gold which is a bit orangey and it was brill)
soured cream or large handful grated mature Cheddar

1 Soak the beans overnight in cold water. Drain, put into a pan with cold water, (don’t add salt or it will make the beans tough) bring to the boil and cook hard for 15 minutes then drain.

2 Heat the oil in a large pan and cook the onion, celery and garlic for 5 minutes until softened. Add the chillies, cumin seeds and paprika and cook for a minute more.

3 Stir in the beans, steak, tomatoes and stock. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer very gently for 3 hours. Stir in the chocolate, season then spoon into bowls and top with a dollop of soured cream or some grated cheese.

Chicken and barley stew

Lovely, yummy, warm your tummy, one-pot, cold-weather dinner
Serves 4
2 tbsp olive oil
3 tbsp plain flour
8 chicken thigh fillets, about 650 – 700g, quartered
3 rashers streaky bacon, cut into 1cm strips
1 butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into chunks
2 tbsp roughly chopped fresh sage
2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
500ml hot chicken stock
300ml red wine
2 leeks, thickly sliced
100g pearl barley
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
large pinch crushed chilli flakes

1 Heat the oil in a large pan. Dust the chicken in the flour and cook in the hot oil along with the bacon for 3 – 4 minutes – you’ll probably need to cook the chicken in two batches, depending on the size of your pan. Add the squash, sage and garlic and cook for a further couple of minutes.

2 Pour in the hot stock and wine and add the leeks, barley, vinegar and chilli flakes. Bring to boil, cover and cook for a good hour or so until the barley is tender. Cook if for longer of you like adding more stock to make it soupy if you like it that way. Taste for salt and pepper.

Osso Bucco

We went to my Christmas party last night. It was thrown by my lovely agents, JHA, at The Lansdowne in Primrose Hill. It used to be an old favourite of mine a very long time ago when I worked in Camden and along with The Eagle in Farringdon, was one of London’s first Gastropubs. All these years later and it has remained pretty much unchanged. The party was lovely and so was the food though it was very slow. The gap between starter and main was nearly an hour but when my Osso Bucco arrived it was fabulous – soft and tender and classically paired with saffron risotto, though having said all that, we’d drunk so much during the wait, I might not have been the best judge.


Elizabeth David's Ossi Buchi Milanese
2lb of shin of veal sawn into pieces 2in thick, ¼ pint each of white wine and stock, 3/4lb tomatoes, parsley, a lemon, a clove of garlic, 2oz butter.
Brown the slices of shin of veal in the butter. Once browned, arrange them in the pan so that they remain upright in order that the marrow in the bone may not fall out as the meat cooks. Pour the white wine over them, let it cook for 10 minutes then add the skinned and chopped tomatoes, let them reduce, add the stock. Season. Cook for 1 ½ – 2 hours.
Prepare a handful of chopped parsley, a clove of garlic, chopped, and the grated peel of half a lemon. The Milanese call this mixture gremolata, and it is an essential part of the traditional ossi buchi Milanese. It is to be sprinkled on top of the ossi buchi before serving.
To make the dish as it should be, a very tender veal from an animal not more than three months old should be used. A dish of risotto Milanese always accompanies ossi buchi.