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  These ' involtini ' are something I had for lunch one day in a hotel in Milan, and started making myself back home. They're easy to make, just a bit fiddly. They're fried aubergine slices rolled round ham and mozzarella, i.e. one aubergine slice makes one roll, and I usually get four slices out of the middle of an aubergine, leaving the unused sides later to make Turkish ' patlıcan kızartma ' (as I make it, ' patlıcan kızartma ' is just chunks of aubergine and sweet pepper fried till tender, turned out, juice and all, on to a bed of yogurt flavoured for an hour or so with crushed garlic, and garnished with sumac and chopped parsley). I think you could count two ' involtini ' per person for a starter, three for a main course. In Milan, they were served with tomato sauce but I don't bother. They make a nice juice of their own as they bake. So, you slice the aubergines lengthwise and fry the slices in olive oil until they're starting to br...

  Kalam polo , rice with cabbage, is aromatic Persian comfort food for winter weekends. It's a typical Iranian main-course rice dish, assembled and finished in one pot. This version, with meatballs, is associated with Shiraz. The recipe is for eight. In the morning, or at least four hours before you cook the rice, you set it to soak. I've always measured rice in what recipes used to call an 'after-dinner coffee cup', so put eight of those, or just over 500 grams in all, in a big bowl, and wash the rice first in hot water, then cold, till the water runs clear. Add a fistful of sea salt - not a pinch, a fistful - cover the rice with fresh cold water and leave it to soak till you're ready to cook it. Make some little meatballs using about 400 grams of meat (not too lean or the meatballs will be dry), two onions chopped fine, herbs (e.g. coriander), maybe some turmeric if you like, and salt and pepper. Whatever: you can use your own usual meatball recipe, and just roll ...

  We've had a cold snap in Paris, so this weekend I made lentil stew, and I thought I might as well write it up here. The stew I make is my version of what was originally a Spanish lentil soup recipe I got from a foodie Händel fan in North Carolina. By now I've altered the balance of ingredients, added more, and made the soup thicker so it can be eaten as a main course. It's a very flexible recipe. Here I'll write it down as I made it this weekend, which was enough for four deep bowls, main-course portions. But you could either double everything to make it for eight, or just double the lentils and water, to make the the lentils more prominent. I sometimes make it that way. It just depends on how 'lentil-heavy' you want it to be. Anyway, this is how I made it for four on Saturday. (In fact there were only two of us, so we had it on Saturday and Sunday, with no starter before, no cheese after, just a pudding each time.) Living in Paris, I can easily buy lard fumé ...

This is the clafoutis straight out of the oven, before being sprinkled with sugar Clafoutis , originally from the Limousin region, is traditionally a black-cherry batter pudding, but people use the same simple technique to make it with various kinds of fruit*. What makes it especially easy is that there's no pastry case: clafoutis is basically sweet Yorkshire pudding with fruit, a toad-in-the-hole with fruit where the sausages would usually be. I do make it with cherries when they're in season, though in Paris cherries with any flavour aren't easy to find and if you find them you'll pay through the nose. I also make it with apricots, or in winter, pears. But this weekend a friend had given me a bunch of garden rhubarb, a fruit I can't resist, so I used that. Typically, you need about 700 or 800g of fruit. Begin early by cutting the rhubarb into chunks and mixing it, in a bowl, with 50g of sugar. I used demerara this time. I also added a couple of tablespoons of va...

  I got to know  spetsofai at Stelios, my 'local' taverna in Mikri Viglia on Naxos, in the Cyclades, where they make you a huge bowl of it to order - so huge that, now, I order one portion for two, with a plate of plain white rice on the side. If you look it up, you'll find spetsofai is supposed to be sausages with sweet peppers and, to make it hot, chillis. At Stelios, a family taverna, I doubt anyone has ever looked into the matter or cares much. They make it more or less like a ratatouille , with courgettes and aubergines and not hot at all, and as I first ate it there, I like it with cubes of aubergine. In any case, if you want an authentic recipe, Akis Petretzikis, whose recipes are foolproof, has one . If you don't really mind either way, here's mine. As usual, making it is easy. The problem is to find a good sausage. Greek 'country sausage', as they call it on menus - loukaniko - is more rustic in flavour and texture than anything I could find in P...

When I first started cooking Asian food, one of the things I used to make was a chicken dish with lemon and coriander from a BBC book by Madhur Jaffrey. Later, for Iranian guests, I sort-of 'persianised' the recipe, and served it with rice made the Persian way, with a golden crust. This is the result. If possible, start the morning before a dinner, or the day before a lunch. For four people with an appetite, you need eight chicken pieces. As I said before, I usually buy what the French call the ' haut de cuisse ', the thigh without the drumstick. If they're from the supermarket, you may need to trim off some 'make-weight' fat and skin tucked underneath the pieces. Set them to brown in hot oil, first one side, then the other. Personally, to avoid getting oil and chicken fat all over the kitchen, I do this with a lid on and, having done one side, switch the heat off for a while to let the spitting die down before turning the pieces over and switching back on a...

  I was alone during the first 2020 lockdown, and for evening meals, started making food that would last me two days or more. As I'm a lazy cook, that also meant making things that more or less cooked themselves, and didn't dirty many pots, me, or the kitchen. One of these dishes is a kind of chicken stew that, with rice, pasta or boiled potatoes, makes two good dinners for me. And the left-over sauce can then be resurrected on the third day to make a pasta dish in its own right. I buy a pack of four of what the French call ' hauts de cuisses ', i.e. the thighs only, without drumsticks, but of course you can buy whatever pieces you want. Place them in cold olive oil, skin-side down, in a wide pan, about four inches deep, then blitz them on a high heat, with the lid on : this way, you don't get oil and fat spitting all over the kitchen and burning your hands. While they're browning, cut up: one large onion garlic if there's any to hand a bulb of fennel or a ...

I really didn't mean this new blog to turn into a food blog, but that seems to be the way it's going so far! Fava is another simple but excellent dish, as anyone who's been to Greece will know. Despite the obvious reference in the name to broad beans, it's a plain but delicious puree or 'porridge' of small, yellow split peas, associated with the island of Santorini. Fava with caper leaves... Until Covid locked us all down at home, I was in the habit of spending a couple of days, at the end of each year's summer holidays, on Santorini, and while there stocking up on the local fava 'beans', which bear a 'protected designation of origin' symbol. The last time I was there, the jeweller I buy my holiday presents from every year noticed I was carrying some fava and jars of capers, dashed off, and eventually came back with a giant bag of the former and a giant jar of the latter, so I was all set to weather the pandemic. Fava more or less makes itsel...

I was at the greengrocer's on the rue de Bretagne yesterday to buy more asparagus, when I saw they now also had baby broad beans. So after last night's baked asparagus, tonight's starter will be habitas con jamón , beans with ham, another springtime treat I can't get enough of. I sometimes wonder when and how people realised some foods have particular affinities with each other. When I was a child, in England, we occasionally had broad beans with bacon. The bacon fat was poured over the beans. Those were inch-long beans, boiled. I first had the Spanish version, habitas con jamón in a back-street family tavern in Sitges. Since then, any time I see it on a Spanish menu I have it. There's even less to this than to baking asparagus. As usual with very simple recipes, the better the produce you use, the better the result will be. I envy anyone who has broad beans in the garden. But I like habitas con jamón so much I'll do them with whatever I can get my hands on, w...

While on the subject of asparagus, this is another dish that's best with French asparagus, but I also make it with the Spanish stuff, or even, at a pinch, with asparagus flown in from Latin America at other times of year. In Rome one sunny day, probably about twenty years ago, I had lunch alone in a restaurant just off the via Condotti. I chose farfalle with asparagus. They mixed the asparagus with spring onion, cream and chervil. It seemed a bit bland to me (and stingy with the asparagus, as usual in restaurants) and I thought, as sometimes happens, I could probably do something similar but better myself. Here's what I've done ever since. I use one bunch of green asparagus to make generous, main-course portions for two people . You could make more reasonably-sized portions for three, and no doubt a decent starter for four. Cut off the bottom half of the stalks and blanch the top half for a few minutes in boiling water, with the fragile tips over the side of the pan, rathe...

'In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.' It's a long time since I was a young man, so my thoughts turn to other things... French asparagus is now in the shops. For me, that means asparagus every week over the next couple of months (and strawberries for pudding), to make the most of it. Many years ago, in Cambridge, a friend served it to me baked and dredged with parmesan, and that's how I've cooked it most often ever since. It could hardly be called a 'recipe' as there's nothing to it. I use a bunch of green asparagus per person , for generous portions as a starter. You could probably use two bunches for three people, or even for four if you serve some Parma or San Daniele ham with it, or if your plan is to use the asparagus as the side dish to a main course. I cut off the bottom half of the stalks; maybe a bit less if they aren't tough. The discarded stalks can (and often do) go into a cold asparagus soup. I lay th...