Serves 2.

Ingredients

• 2 Sainsbury’s Basics frozen white fish fillets, defrosted and chopped into large chunks
• Optional: handful of defrosted frozen prawns
• 1 onion
• 1 red pepper
• 2 fresh chillies
• small (160ml Waitrose Essentials) tin of coconut cream
• 3 cloves of garlic
• tin or carton of Basics chopped tomatoes
• 3 tsp ground coriander
• 2 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp turmeric powder
• thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger
• small handful of fresh coriander
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil

Method

To make the paste, whizz up in a blender the chillies, ground coriander, cumin, ginger, turmeric & garlic.

Fry the onions and red peppers in some oil, add the paste – fry for a bit more so the spices seep into the oil, then add the tomatoes and coconut cream. Bring to the boil, add the fish and simmer for 20 minutes with a lid on. Add some chopped fresh coriander at the end, and serve with boiled basmati rice. Delicious and warming on a dark and stormy winter’s night waiting for Sherlock to come on TV.

I’d have taken a photo, but it didn’t hang around long enough.

Serves 4. You will need:

• 200g cous cous
• 2 x 400g tins chopped tomatoes
• 2 x teaspoons harissa paste – more if you like it hot
• 2 x large teaspoons of garam masala ground spice mix
• 1 x 400g tin of chickpeas
• 1 very large or 2 medium onions
• 1 large clove of garlic
• 3 chicken breasts
• 2 handfuls of chopped dried apricots

Chop the onion and fry in a little olive oil with the garam masala spice in two separate pans. The spices should cook a bit and flavour the oil. After the onion has cooked a bit add half the chopped garlic to each pan. Add a teaspoon of harissa paste to each pan and give a good stir.

Cut the chicken breasts into strips and add to one pan, stirring so they get coated with the spices and cook all over. Add one third of the drained, rinsed chickpeas to the chicken, and then put the rest (two thirds) in the veggie pot.

When the chicken strips look cooked, add a handful of apricots and a tin of tomatoes to each pan, season with salt & pepper, top up with a little water if needed, put lids on and simmer for half an hour or so. Make the cous cous up by following the instructions on the packet – I just poured on boiling water to slightly more than cover the cous cous in a bowl, left it for 10 minutes and fluffed it up with a fork.

Give everyone two large spoons of cous cous and put the stew on top – serve with a dollop of yoghurt if it’s extra spicy, or and / or some chopped coriander leaves.

It was delicious. The veggie one ended up much spicier than the meat one for some reason – I must have put more harissa in it. I’m having the leftovers with Turkish flatbread for my lunch tomorrow. Can’t wait.

• Whole bulb of garlic, unpeeled
• 2kg lamb, trimmed & cut into 5cm pieces. The recipe calls for leg but I wonder if cheaper cuts would work.
• 4 tablespoons olive oil
• 400g tin of tomatoes (or 6 plum tomatoes)
• 1 tablespoon tomato puree
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 teaspoon dried mint
• juice of 1 and a half lemons
• chips!

Simmer the garlic bulb whole in water for 15-20 minutes. When soft, drain and dry; squeeze each clove into a pestle & mortar and squish.

Heat the oil in a large pan, fry the lamb until browned on all sides. Add tomatoes, tomato puree, herbs and garlic. Season with salt & pepper. Add enough water to cover stew and simmer for about 90 mins or 2 hours until lamb tender and sauce thick. Add the lemon juice in the last 15 minutes of cooking – the lemon juice really cuts through the greasiness of the lamb.

Serve with chips / French fries.

From Issue 2 of the excellent Jamie Magazine.

-o-

Lamb Lagoto Redux

Diced lamb is devilishly expensive, so tonight I tried to make this with lamb shanks instead. It was a huge success.

before going in the oven

Follow the method above, but use 2 lamb shanks and 2 tins of chopped tomatoes. Brown the shanks in a casserole dish, add all the ingredients and put in an oven at about 170 degrees C for a couple of hours. The meat just fell away from the bones and melted in the mouth.

I also cracked chips tonight – I can honestly say my chips were better than chip shop chips. I cut big, thick chips – cooked them for about 10 mins until soft on the lowest heat of my deep fat fryer (approx 160 C), put them in the freezer for half an hour then cooked them until golden in the fryer on its hottest setting (190 C). Crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside – and not at all greasy. Perfect!

My deep fat fryer has been banished to the shed, so a stew like this is a very welcome thing on a cold night working down the smallest, coldest chippy in SE London.

after being in a low oven for a few hours

• 4 small pieces of root ginger tied up in a muslin bag
• 1lb (250g) cooking apples – peeled, cored & minced
• 4 medium onions, minced
• 3lb (750g) green tomatoes, thinly sliced
• 8oz (225g) sultanas
• 8oz (225g) demerara sugar
• 2 level tsp salt
• 3/4 pint (400ml) malt vinegar (Sainsbury’s basics malt vinegar is 13p a pint)
• half tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tsp mustard powder

I blitzed the apple, onion & ginger in the food processor. I know it says put them in a muslin bag, but I wanted to give this some poke. I may have also been over-generous with the cayenne pepper.

Chuck everything in a huge pan. Boil, then simmer & reduce, stirring occasionally, for about 2 hours. Bottle in steralized jars when still piping hot.

I’ll let you know how this batch turns out in a month or so – pan-scrapings suggested this is fearsomely spicy but delicious.

This is a great way of using up any allotment tomato glut. The sweet sauce can be frozen and used as a base for pasta sauce (just add basil, chilli, anchovies or whatever you fancy) or as a base for soup.
Heat the oven to 180 C. Get a load of ripe, or over-ripe, tomatoes. Wash, dry and halve the tomatoes. Sprinkle with a little olive oil, salt, pepper and finely chopped garlic.
Roast for about 45 minutes, then in small batches, press the roasted tomatoes while still warm through a sieve with a wooden spoon, to remove the seeds and skins. Really delicious even on its own. (A top tip from the original River Cottage Cookbook by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.)

Fry some basmati rice in some vegetable oil. Add some garlic, a bit of onion if you like, and a teaspoon of cumin and cook for a minute or two. Then add water or chicken stock – at least twice the volume of liquid compared to the rice, some chopped red pepper or chillis and tomatoes if you like – I squeeze is a slug of tomato ketchup at this point. Cover and simmer gently until cooked.

We made veggie ones and steak ones. Both use the sneaky salsa (below) though this time we left out the ketchup and used lime juice instead of lemon.

Veggie burrito filling:
Get a carton of black beans from Sainsbury’s. Fry an onion, garlic and finely chopped fresh red chilli until the onion is translucent. Add the beans with the juice. Simmer for 20 mins. I can’t begin to explain how tasty these simple ingredients are – this is culinary alchemy of which Frank Bath would be proud (Georgina knows what this means even if no-one else does!)

Carnivore burrito filling:
Fry a chopped onion. Thinly slice steak, garlic, fresh chilli and chuck them in, fry until brown. Add a dash of Worcester sauce, Tabasco sauce and a pinch of cayenne pepper.

Assemblage
Warm some soft tortilla wraps in a dry pan. Add sliced lettuce, your filling of choice, grated cheese, sneaky salsa, sour cream, rice, whatever you fancy. Enjoy. We did.

• Tomatoes
• A red onion
• Fat clove of garlic
• Squeeze of lemon or lime juice
• pinch of salt
• Slug of tomato ketchup
• Slug of olive oil
• Fresh coriander (we keep a bunch in the freezer)

Gently whizz in a blender or chop finely by hand. Serve with tortilla chips. And cold beer. Yum.

• Fresh tomatoes
• fresh basil and/or dried herbs
• garlic
• onion
• cream
• red wine (optional)
• vegetable stock
• tomato puree

Halve and roast the tomatoes with garlic and onion, scattered with oregano and basil (we used dried mixed herbs and fresh basil). When skins start to blaken, pulp in the Magimix. Put the puree in a pan with some red wine (we skipped that with no ill-effects), stock and tomato puree. Whisk to combine, reheat gently on the stove and then stir in some cream or fromage frais (we used double cream) when it simmers. Just delicious.