Liver paté

If you're Doing Things With Giblets, this is part two and you already have your chicken / turkey / capon livers, otherwise fowl livers are ever so cheap to come by, especially if you buy them frozen. This is my mum's gorgeous recipe (as you'll see by the fine lettering, though she will probably decry it as Early Work) and makes a silky-smooth rich flavoursome paté.

What to do with giblets

Anyone who roasted a fowl yesterday probably got an alarming little bag of Bits with it - The Giblets - alarmingly close in name to gibbets, and a kind of "finishing present". (A Finishing Present entered family folklore some years back. In the late 80s / early 90s, making pompoms was all the rage. They're surprisingly work-intensive. One of my small cousins started a massively over-ambitious pompom, with a huge disc, for a birthday present for me. She wound the wool around it until it had reached about a centimetre thick around the disc. The rest of the wool-winding would have taken about three years and resulted in a pompom the size of my head. Nevertheless, she gamely gave me the unfinished pompom, and said it was "a finishing present".) So your purveyor of meats has given you a finishing present. Wtf do you do with it, besides put it in the fridge for a decent interval before chucking it? Or give it to your daughter, alongside a carcass with rich pickings, for her to do magic with? TL;DR: pull out the liver for liver paté, turn the rest into a fabulously rich stock.

How to make yogurt

I recently read an article which suggested, to my absolute horror, that my friends in the States don't have proper access to real yogurt, only the kind to which sugar and syrups and suchlike have beeen added, an idea I find so upsetting that I have to put it right immediately by teaching you how to make it.

Aubergine sausage and olive stew

I threw this together as one of those random oh-and-we-have-that-too stews and was so astonishingly impressed with it, I immediately scrawled all the ingredients down in the Little Living-room Book of Thoughts. (It's important to have spangly wee notebooks stashed about the house generally, but in the living room especially, because you never know when Doctor Who or Farscape will trigger a major ephiphany, or you'll be struck with a thought about right-angles, or need to jot down a poem or plot line, or, indeed, a recipe.) The main point of amazement, though, was OLIVES! IN A STEW! IN STEW! OLIVES! You can put olives in stew. PUT OLIVES IN STEW.

Garlic pickle elixir of life

There is nothing* better than friends who like the same sort of food that you do, but have different recipe books. We invited said friends (not knowing this about them yet) for dinner. Did they like curry? Yes, they said. And if it was quite hot, chilli-hot? Um... some of it really quite hot? Yes, they said. But we were nervous. It used to be, English people would say they liked really hot food, and then you served them really hot food, and then they died, and it was your fault they were dead, but you'd asked and they said yes. (If you're not born and bred here, it's very hard to know when English people don't like things. Because asking doesn't work, and there are no visible signs, but apparently there are minute signals with which they communicate with each other. I've done my best to go native since I started living here, but some of the finer details still elude me, to my frustration. At times I've suspected some of the information is passed on chemically, as plants do. Anyway.) So we prepared a wide range of curries, a veritable feast, all the way from the mildest up to a Balti phal, and I added fine green beans to the Balti phal, and thus by accident camouflaged the whole green chillis, which added an unexpected Russian-roulette dimension to that part of the dinner. They seemed very happy, though I always wonder if I'm missing chemical signals, even with people I know well.

THEN: they invited us around to theirs for dinner, on their boat. And prepared us a veritable curry feast! Of splendidly hot rich and various curries, a marvel of food joy, and totally different recipes to the ones we know! And they fed us garlic pickle. And only courtesy stopped me eating the entire lot out the jar with a teaspoon.

Green tapenade

I was going to share garlic pickle next, with a bit of story-time, but let's complete the dips triumvirate first, of black-olive tapenade, hummus, and green-olive tapenade. Some people might put taramasalata into the mix, but in case you haven't noticed, I don't much like fish. (I deeply regret this and am trying to work on it, slowly; so far I can actively enjoy mussels, oysters, shrimps, and salmon, and can eat other kinds of shellfish, but no actual fish besides salmon, and I will swill my mouth with sour milk to get rid of the taste of anchovies.) So, green-olive tapenade it is!

Hummus: it's not middle-class, it's chickpeas.

I get alternately baffled and a bit harrumphy when perfectly innocent food-stuffs get designated as being a particular class. Lentils as middle-class bewilders me especially - lentils? Seriously? The incredibly cheap, nutritious staple eaten by most of the subcontinent? Likewise hummus. It's not middle-class, it's chickpeas. With some other stuff. You could call it Greek fairly accurately, if you wanted, but not middle-class. And yet despite its now being very widespread and familiar, the 'orrible little label persists. So: sod that. It's not middle-class, it's chickpeas.

Kimchi

A quick break from the avalanche of curries, because the cold / flu is still going strong, and a bowlful of kimchi is suddenly the most magical salty-chilli-gingery-garlicky elixir imaginable, and a brilliant fuschia-purple to boot. You know the way a spoonful of Branston pickle can make your mouth spasm in sudden pickle-lust? That's what kimchi does.

Luxurious dhal

This is a gloriously luxurious dhal, so a bit more effort than most, so I go into a bit of a disquisition on dhal and lentils first, and then a random tangent of family folklore, and then get back onto the subject of how to make it, but you shouldn't think all dhals are this as involved as this one, but it is, of course, thoroughly worth it.

Lots Lasagne

It's just as easy to make three lasagnes as to make one, so this makes three, each serving 4-6 people, so you can eat one and freeze two, or invite an extra twelve friends around, or turn up to someone's move with enough lasagne to feed all the helpers for a couple of days.

Random marinated olives ~ with future flavoured oil

Sometimes I do large quantities of marinated olives in big jars with much planning and special Buying Of The Olives And the Olive Oil; this evening I absentmindedly and sleepily pootled about the kitchen throwing stuff in a jar and literally throwing coriander seeds about the place, all because I'd absentmindedly and sleepily drained too many olives at lunchtime, for salad, and the remaining olives were starting to look all dry and sad in the colander in the sink. It took about ten minutes. It would've taken five, if I'd been less absentminded and sleepy, and hadn't spent quite as much time collecting coriander seeds I'd thrown around. You also end up with amazing flavoured oil.

Moroccan stew *aka* Beef tagine

Rich, warming, heavy with lighter spice notes, definitely a winter dish - I discovered this recipe last winter, and over the summer dreamed of when the mists would be chill enough (and I well enough) to cook it again. It's one of those dishes that as soon as you discover it, you want to get people round and feed it to them all the time because everyone must taste this. WARNING: You need to spice-rub the meat the night before (or that morning) and it needs three hours in the oven, (after about 10-20 minutes prep time, depending how fast you chop). So if you're not at home in the afternoons, this is a weekend cook, but it makes masses (serves 8, I reckon). It's also part of the cooking-for-one week 2, so line up your 250ml tupperwares to receive! (It freezes like a dream.)

Green masala paste

This is another one from The Balti Bible and is amazingly intense, fresh, & flavoursome. It's one of the key ingredients in jalfrezi; you can also stir a tablespoon or two into cooked lentils to make a dahl, add a teaspoon to any curry at the end instead of / as well as fresh coriander, mix a quarter teaspoon into 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise for egg mayonnaise... it would probably do well being stirred into cooked veg, too. A little goes a long way. If you accidentally lick the spoon (as I invariably do), your head blows off with herb intensity.

Who wants to make garam and Balti masala?

I learnt to make both these spice mixes from The Balti Bible, which my dad gave me in 1999. I'll be posting a few of the recipes, but if you like curry, and you like cooking, I seriously recommend it. Most of the main-meal recipes use both garam masala and Balti masala, and the side dishes generally get a sprinkling of garam at the end. Nothing compares to the smell (and flavour) of freshly made curry mix; the exorbitant supermarket jars fade to dust in comparison. Little jars of spice mix also make super presents. (Masala means mix.) This is project-cooking, weekend daytimes, holidays: the mix you make will last you plenty of time so you don't mind spending a sunny or rainy Saturday afternoon filling the house with spice smells.

The magnificent bolognese

This is the opposite of Spontaneous Pasta, my quickety-quick don't-even-cook-the-tomato-just-warm-it ten-minute-from-start-to-finish dish. You are going to sloooooow cook this baby.
You're going to pick a day when you're home anyway and feel mellow and relaxed and quietly interested in the world. Hey, put it on at lunchtime if you fancy.

Anyone want to make tapenade?

Last-minute decision to join the Wolvercote big lunch, nothing prepared, but tapenade is crazy-quick (especially if you don't stop to take photographs at every stage) and all I was missing was lemons, and the corner shop could stump those up, at least.