Stuffed boned duck

I've been doing this for a while, now. Recipe Rifle's first birthday came and went in October without me even really noticing. I'm not especially sentimental about things like that. Although I realise I'm going to have to be a bit sentimental about the child's first birthday or people will just be, like, so judgmental.

Anyway, quite a lot of people have started saying to me "are you going to turn it into a book..?" or, if they're feeling mean "I suppose you'll be wanting to turn it into a book."

And the idea that all you need to do to get a book deal is write a fucking blog really really makes me laugh. Bitterly. "Ha!" I say. "Ha ha haaaaaaaarghhhhhghgh."

I have in fact written a book and it's great and I love it. In fact, it's the best thing I've ever written or probably will ever write. It's perfect. It's as good as Edmund: A Butler's Tale, with fewer sizzling gypsies. But no agent or publisher will touch it.

Why? Because it's a short comic homage to Kingley Amis's Lucky Jim. And the publishing world is like "What the fucking fuck do you want us to do with that? Is it a misery memoir? No. Is it about a dead toddler? No. Are you Michael fucking Macintyre? NO! Get out of my office, kid."
That's how they talk in publishing, seriously.

Except for a nice man, whose name I can't remember, who works at my husband's publisher. He asked me if I was writing a book and when I told him what it was, this short comic homage to Lucky Jim, set in a school, he made a face like a surgeon looking at a really nasty X-Ray. Then, with the bedside manner of a private doctor telling someone they're going to die, and quite soon, he explained very nicely why it was never going to get published. But I knew that already.

Occasionally a sympathetic friend who also has literary pretensions will demand to read this magnificent octopus. And I always refuse. And they say "Why?"

And I say "Because my book is like Centrepoint?"
And they say "Centrepoint the office block in Tottenham Court Road?"
And I say "Yes."
And they say "?"

And I say "Well, you're probably too young to remember all this, but after Centrepoint was built in 1966 by the property tycoon Harry Hyams, it was left empty for years. No-one could understand why. There was all this excellent office space just empty. What was Hyams thinking? Well, what he was thinking was that Centrepoint was more valuable to him empty than it was rented out - because the money he could levy against the potential rental income of the office space was more useful to him than the income itself.

"In the same way, sort of, if no-one ever reads my book, it can remain potentially the best short comic homage to Lucky Jim, set in a school, ever written. But once a lot of people read it, they'll start having all sorts of opinions about it and say it doesn't live up to the hype and stuff like that. So it's more valuable to me un-read than read."

People usually make their excuses and leave at this point.

But I tell you who did get a book deal out of writing a blog: Julie Powell of Julie & Julia fame. And I was reminded of how irritating she is while watching the eponymous film the other evening. The fuss she makes about boning a duck. Honestly. The scene when she says to her husband "Can you even conceive of boning a duck?" while waggling her fingers infuriates me. Illiterate French pot-bashers can do it, for fuck's sake. Stop whining.

So I thought I'd make that ludicrous and revolting-sounding stuffed boned duck in pastry thing just because that scene pissed me off so much. And just because I want to prove that however hard it might sound, boning a duck is so much easier than getting a book deal.

But I haven't done it yet because I need to pop out for all the ingredients. So bear with me.

Relax, it's totally kosher

I'm worried that I'm turning into a bit of a neat freak. It's worrying because I have built an entire persona around being a bit shabby around the edges, a bit sloppy in my personal administration. I use the clothes horse as extra storage space and there is a sludgy layer of decomposed receipts, tickets and tissues from last winter's cold at the bottom of my handbag. And about eight lip balms! So that's where they all went.

But I've been sober for too long. And now mess bothers me. An unplumped sofa is irritating. This very morning, I got up and got dressed and couldn't - actually couldn't - put on a slightly wrinkled sweater (fresh from the clothes horse) until I'd given it a quick iron, despite the fact that it's just some size 18 navy blue thing from Gap to go over a size 14 ugly striped tube dress I've been wearing for the last 6 years, (it feels like).

It's a shame that this new manic cleanliness has coincided with the too-huge-to-move stage of up the duffness. As I spot a cobweb in a corner of the living room, I flail for a good five minutes like a tortoise on its back to get off the sofa in search of a duster. And I thought pregnant women were just putting it on! No.

But I don't want to be a neat freak because I don't really like neat freaks, although they're better than hopeless slobs. But my identity! It's my identity. It's like alcoholics and smokers who can't give up, not because they're actually addicted, but because they truly believe it's the most interesting thing about them.

So I thought the best thing to do would be to invite a kosher Jew round for dinner. If there's anyone who appreciates a bit of manic housewifery, it's a kosher Jew.

My friend X lives and works primarily among the goyim, (that's you and me), and doesn't get to eat meat very often, and especially not at other people's houses, because buying kosher meat isn't like buying organic meat, it's like buying magic meat or contrabrand and the purveyors don't really want to sell it to you.
They hide their shops away in the middle of nowhere and shut, on Fridays - when you need it most - at lunchtime. But they're pretty nice people, otherwise, and when you run in shrieking "Give me that fucking chicken!" three minutes before they lock up for the weekend, they sell it to you, and some chicken livers for good measure.

Because of the list of rules and regs about kosher cooking, which thrilled the new neat-freak me, and the heavy dose of the religious about proceedings, I stopped thinking it was my old friend X coming for dinner, and started worrying that it might actually be God himself.

And an Old Testament God is quite a scary prospect. He's not really into turning the the other cheek and lending you his tamborine to sing kumbaya; he's more about raging down off the top of a mountain, shaking you by the neck and screaming "What the fuck do you think you're doing?!" before sending a plague of boils through your letterbox.

So as I cast my eyes over my Shabbas table with its candles and covered bread (don't ask - too complicated) and white tablecloth, it all looked so ritualistic that I got a faint sense that I was about to be sacrificed.

See what I mean?

But then X arrived and said a couple of prayers and my feeling of doom disappeared and we all fell on the chopped liver like we hadn't seen meat for a fortnight, which X actually hadn't.

The pot roast chicken I did with this late-purchase kosher bird was exactly the same as Nigella's chicken, so I won't go through all that again,




...but here's a picture anyway


but chopped liver is a thing worth describing.

Obviously, unless you're kohser, you can use any chicken liver for this.

Chopped liver, for 4

1 packet chicken livers from Waitrose, which I think comes in at about 300g
1 large onion
3 eggs
some parsley if you like
a lot of salt and pepper

1 Put your eggs on to boil for 10 minutes. You might have some clever way of boiling eggs, in which case, do it like that.

2 Chop your onion and fry gently for at least 15 minutes in some vegetable or groundnut oil.

3 Wash the livers and take off any gross or green bits. Then grill hard, both sides, until they start to blacken a bit. Yes, I know this is counter-intuitive but it's how it's done, okay? This won't take more than about 4 minutes each side.

4 Roughly chop 2 of the boiled eggs and the livers and put them, with the onions, in a food processor. Pulse or blend until you get a kind of mortar-ish, spreadable rubble. You might have to do this in two batches and you might have to loosen it a bit with some veg or light olive oil.

5 Add salt and pepper until it tastes nice. I added a lot, probably in the end about three or four big pinches of salt and nine or ten turns of the pepper grinder.

6 Turn out onto a serving plate thingy, then chop up the last boiled egg finely and sprinkle over the top. You can also sprinkle over some parsley if you like

7 Eat with challah, which is that plaited bread. It's very sweet and you can make an excellent bread and butter pudding with the leftovers, says X. And don't forget the pickle! Haimisha cucumbers. Yum.

Amen.

Mrs Coren's Chicken Pie

Even better, if possible, eaten re-heated the next day

A lot of people like to say that they don't do things by halves. "I'm an 'all-or-nothing' person" they say.

I don't know about you, but I usually take that not to mean that they're the kind of person who, once they've started the washing up, washes up until everything looks like new and then clears the draining board, dries everything up, puts it away and then wipes down all the surfaces.

Rather, I usually take it as a euphamism for them liking to get very shitfaced. More shitfaced than anyone else, in fact. Not half shitfaced, but fully shitfaced. And they end up not doing the washing up at all because they're too shitfaced, or hungover, to do a "proper" job. "I'm an all-or-nothing person," they'll say, from the sofa, a glass of Alka Seltzer dangling from a pale and trembling hand.

I'm not like that. I like doing pretty much everything by halves. I find that six or seven halves add up to some wholes. People who don't do things by halves usually end up not doing anything at all, whereas I rage through to-do lists like Tas of Tasmania, doing everything a bit rubbishly. But it gets done. In the end.

There are exceptions, of course, to my general slapdash attitude. And this chicken pie is one of them.

Most pies are a thing that you do with the leftovers from a roast. Shepherd's pie - leftover lamb; Cottage pie, leftover beef; Chicken pie - you get the idea - made to go further with pastry and vegetables. But people don't really do that anymore. They put any leftovers in sandwiches and buy ground lamb, ground beef or chicken pieces if they want to make a pie.

And if you want to make a chicken pie fast, you can. You can use breast meat and bought puff-pastry. I reckon you could  have it done, start to finish, in an hour. Maybe an hour and a half.

But I kind of think, what's the point? I find those kinds of pies a bit thin and insubstantial - the precise word is "jejune", if you're interested - you know what I mean? The breast meat is bit gritty and not right for a pie and bought puff pastry is all very well... but the point of any pie is not that it's quick, it's that it's rich, comforting and a little bit of an effort.

If you haven't got time to make a chicken pie properly, then maybe leave it until you do have some time and, instead, whip up a perfectly servicable spanish omelette, or a chorizo-and-bean stew or - hell - bacon and eggs.

This chicken pie takes a while and this recipe is very long, because you have to make the rough puff pastry, the white sauce and roast up the chicken seperately, then assemble it. But it really isn't hard and it really is worth it. If you find yourself with a slow afternoon, make some of the pastry - or the entire thing - and freeze it if you want to cut out a stage or more.

I'm using Hugh FW's rough puff pastry for this and not Delia's quick flaky pastry because I find grating frozen butter incredibly horrid.

Please don't be freaked out by the long list of ingredients - they're all very readily available.

Mrs Coren's Chicken Pie
serves 6

1 quantity of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Rough Puff Pastry (see below)
4 chicken drumsticks
4 chicken thighs
6 rashers streaky bacon
A handful of mushrooms - any you like
1 leek
2 stalks celery
1 medium onion or two small ones
3 sprigs thyme
2 bay leaves
4 cloves garlic
1 quantity white sauce:
(50g butter
some plain flour
600 ml milk)
salt and pepper
1 glass shitty white wine
1 beaten egg
vegetable oil - or dripping if you're feeling a bit Mrs Beeton

1 Toss your chicken pieces, peeled garlic cloves and HALF the herbs in oil, salt and pepper and then put in the oven at 180 for 1hr 10min to roast. Give them a jiggle round once or twice during cooking.

2 Make your pastry thus:

- 400g plain flour
- 200g lard, cut into 2cm x 1cm chunks
- large pinch salt
- about 200ml iced water

Sieve the flour into a bowl and sprinkle over the salt. Chuck in the lard lumps and toss until all coated with flour. Then add the iced water until you've got a firm-ish dough that's not to wet and sticky. Although if you do splosh in a bit too much water just sprinkle over some more flour to compensate.

At this stage it will look ghastly - all bits hanging off and massive lumps of lard - and flour everywhere. Don't worry, this is normal. Turn out your scraggy dough onto a floured surface and roughly shape into a fat rectangle.

With a floured rolling pin, roll the pastry away from you in one direction until you get an elongated rectangle. When the pastry is about 2cm thick, fold the furthest third towards you and the nearest edge away and over the other, like you're folding a letter.

Now turn your bundle 90 degrees to the right and roll it away from you again. You should do this a minumum of 4 times, but preferably 6 or 7. You'll find that the pastry becomes better-looking as you do this. Keep count of your turns, though, because if you over-roll the pastry it'll become tough.

Keep it well-floured. Then stick it in a freezer bag or in a bowl in clingfilm and put in the fridge for an hour.

2 Chop up your onions, leek, mushroom, bacon and celery all small-ish and fry very gently with the remaining half of the herbs in some vegetable oil or dripping for at least 15 minutes. After this time, throw in your glass of shitty wine and turn the heat up full until the wine has bubbled away - this takes about 3-4 minutes. Take the pan off the heat and set to one side.

3 Make your white sauce by melting 50g of butter in a large-ish saucepan (it needs to be large because you are going to add the chicken and vegetables to it later). Then take the pan off the heat and add enough flour to make a butter-and-flour paste. Then with the pan still off the heat, add a long sloop of milk and stir until the paste and the milk are mixed in with each other. A few tiny lumps at this stage don't matter.

Put the pan back on a medium heat and add the rest of milk. Stir or whisk until the sauce thickens but don't bring it to the boil. Once the sauce has thickened - this takes about 4-5 minutes - take the heat right down and season with salt and pepper until it tastes nice. Add cream if you want but not creme fraiche as I did the other week because it makes it go strangely sandy.

4 By this point, give or take, your pastry ought to have had enough time in the fridge and the chicken ought to have roasted up. If it's not quite ready, read Grazia for a bit. Or clean up the kitchen, if that's not the lamest suggestion I've ever made. But I've started clearing as I go, although I really despise myself for it.

When all your various bits are ready, strip the meat off the roasted-up chicken and chop up into chunks. It's your call whether you put the skin in or not - I do. Then add this and your cooked veg - fish out the bay leaves and thyme stalks - to the white sauce. Give it all a stir. Taste. Cry if it's horrible. (But it won't be.) Add more salt and pepper now if you want. If you feel like it, maybe a spoonful of Dijon mustard or some finely-chopped parsley.

Pour this mixture into whatever dish you're going to bake your pie in. Then remove the pastry from the fridge and roll it out to about 0.5-1cm thick. Or more, if you really like pastry. If you're feeling really pedantic, don't press too hard otherwise it will shrink on cooking.

Brush around the edges of  your pie dish with beaten egg to help the pastry stick and then lay the pastry on top. Trim away the excess (ball it up and put in the freezer for another project) and press down round the edges of the pie dish with the flat edge of a fork to make little lines. Brush the whole of the top with beaten egg and make a 1cm slit in the middle of the pie to let steam escape.

Put in the oven at 180C for 40 minutes. If you've rolled your pastry very thick, it will need a bit longer, maybe an hour.

After all, you're not a person who does things by halves.

Jamie's jerk chicken

Sorry for the appalling picture. I simply don't understand my camera and it occasionally has a kind of spontaneous fit and if it agrees to take a picture at all, it's a bad one, despite the machine costing several hundred pounds (of someone else's money).

So last night I made this out of Jamie's 30-Minute Meals because I LOVE JAMIE OLIVER in the way only a trembling, slightly tearful frightened pregnant lady can. Every time I turn to my recordings on the V+ box there is just a long list of Jamie Oliver programmes. It's quite embarrassing when my husband's in the room because it's like he can see into my head and it's going: "Jamie Oliver Jamie Oliver Jamie Oliver Jamie Oliver." But I think my husband's got a weeny little crush on JO as well so that's okay.

This jerk chicken is very exciting, but I think there might be a small mistake in the sauce quantities. I only think, though, I'm probably wrong. But it specifies 6 tablespoons EACH of vinegar and rum, which makes the sauce quite wet, and it gets wetter on cooking, which I'm not sure can be right.

Feel free to make this as it stands, or to do what I would do if I were making this again, which would be to add only three tablespoons each of the vinegar and rum to make six tablespoons of wet stuff in total.

A little bird, okay it's my friend AC... who actually is quite little and a bird so very apt description... says that she thought this sauce was a bit wet, too - and something else Jamie did with plums was also wet. So, it's still a mystery, but at least IT'S NOT JUST ME.

[N.B - I made this again the other day with half-quantities of the wet stuff and it turned out much, much better - so do that, I'd say.]

The ingredients list below is exactly as it is in the book. The method is a bit different.

Jamie's jerk chicken

4 chicken breasts
4 spring onions
small bunch fresh thyme
3 fresh bay leaves
ground cloves
ground nutmeg
ground allspice
6 tbs rum (!) - I say use only 3
6 tbs cider/red wine vinegar (!) - ditto
1 tbs runny honey
1 Scotch bonnet chilli (I used 2 red chillies from Waitrose, one seeds in, one seeds out - worked v well)
4 cloves garlic

1 Turn your oven to 220C. Oil a griddle pan, or a normal pan if you haven't got a griddle, and get it roasting hot. Cut the chicken in two at the fattest part so it's still in one piece at the thinnest part but then divides like a sort of cloven hoof (does that make sense?). This helps it cook quicker.

Put the chicken skin-side down in the hot pan and then leave it alone for about 5-6 minutes. Don't poke it about because you want the skin to go crispy and a bit charred and you've got a better chance of that happening (this goes for steak, too) if you just let it get on with it.

2 Chop up the spring onions a bit and put in a whizzer with all the other sauce ingredients. If you haven't got the spices ground, as I didn't, smash about half a teaspoon of each in a pestle and mortar and grate in a big pinch of nutmeg. If using ground, take a big pinch of each spice.

3 Pour your whizzed jerk sauce into an oven dish. Then remove the chicken from the pan and place skin-side up in the pool of sauce. Drizzle over, if you like, an extra tablespoon of honey, more salt and pepper and sprigs of thyme and rosemary if you want it to look nice. Jamie's advice, which I always now follow (because it's love, after all) is that you should smush oil over herbs before scattering them on top of a dish like this so that they cook rather than frazz.

4 Cook on a high shelf for 15 minutes.

Pizza Part II

Although the Cheat's Pizza I wrote about a few weeks ago was a revelation, I kind of wondered what part it could play in my life. What problem does it solve? Great for one or two people, but impossible in larger quantities - and isn't the whole point of making a pizza, at home, from scratch, to give other people a home-made pizza experience?

And I was also curious about Jamie Oliver's pizza dough, which a lot of people say is nice, but I wanted to see it for myself. And it is fantastic - obviously. You sacrifice nothing: not taste, nor texture.

So I made up a quantity of this dough and rather than dithering about frying it in a pan and then putting it under a grill, I found a flat baking sheet that could fit both in my oven and under the grill and decided to go with that. The trick is to briefly bake the pizza base in the oven before you put the ingredients on top and then finish it off under the grill - it stops the whole thing going soggy.

I used a 12in x 17in baking tray, which gives enough pizza easily for 4 people, or enough for about 6 hungry children. Wow that makes me sound like a really nice person, like I might be making this for a bunch of 7 year-olds. Fat chance.

This recipe makes enough dough for TWO 12in x 17in pizzas. I recommend freezing the extra for another pizza moment as making the dough is the only faffy bit.


500g very type 00 italian flour
OR
400g very strong plain bread flour + 100g semolina
1/2 tablespoon salt
1/2 tablespoon sugar
7g dried yeast
325ml warm water
2 tablespoons olive oil

1 Sift together the flour and salt and make a well in the middle.

2 Mix together the water, oil, sugar and yeast. Stir and leave for 3 minutes. Then pour into the flour and mix round with a fork. When it comes together, turn it out onto a floured surface and knead for 4-5 minutes until it's springy and cohesive

3 Put it on some kind of floured surface, your choice what - dust with more flour, cover with a tea towel and leave somewhere warm for an hour.

4 After that time, pummel the dough out a bit on a well-floured surface and knead it round for 4-ish minutes. Then divide this ball into half and roll it out very, very thin to about the shape of your baking sheet - it doesn't have to be a precise rectangle. Make sure the pizza base is well-dusted top and bottom with flour so it doesn't stick to anything.

5 Put this to one side for 20 minutes. Now turn your oven and your grill on to the highest they will go and make some tomato sauce (1/2 can chopped tomatoes, 1 clove garlic, 1 spring basil, 1 glug olive oil, large pinch salt and whizzzzzz in a whizzy machine) and chop up all your toppings now because you'll want to scatter them quick quick over your pre-baked pizza base.

6 Your kitchen by now ought to be worryingly hot from the heat blasting out of your grill and oven. Slide your baking sheet into the oven, as close to the top of the oven as you can get it, for about 3 minutes.

7 Remove from the oven and scatter ideally with semolina or you can use flour. Now carefully lay your well-floured pizza base into the now-boiling-hot baking sheet. This isn't that easy. I recommend picking the dough up with a rolling pin and then laying it down on the sheet and sort of rolling it on - if that makes any sense. Anyway, just do it the best way you can see how and if you find a foolproof way, do share.

8 Stick this back in the oven for about 3-4 minutes, just until the edges of the dough are begining to very lightly colour and the dough feels light and not sticky to the touch.

9 Remove and pour over the tomato sauce, spread it around and add the mozzarella and whatever else you want to it. Then shove back in the oven for about 6-8 minutes until the dough is crisping up and going dark brown around the edges. Finish off under the grill. Produce for lunch to screams of awe.



I can't quite believe that I've got this far without launching into a huge insane rant about what a terrible mood I'm in. Like I'm angry like I used to get at my old job. I just filed a piece and got an email back along the lines of "Thanks. Could we make a few changes..." and there followed, I promise you, about 18 things they wanted to change. And they're shite changes. But BIG changes. And I've written it now and going back over it seems like being made to eat the dinner you didn't want last night for breakfast. And I want to tell them to go and fuck themselves, right in the bum, but I can't, because it's that kind of shitty attitude that got me into this mess in the first place.

But, you know, it's only pride. And they probably know what's best for them. And at least they asked rather than just changing everything themselves to make me sound like someone else was using the family braincell when I wrote it.

I would say that being able to write whatever I want here and not being asked to change things has spoiled me - but being asked to change things has always pissed me off no end. Unless it's the Mail, of course, in which case you just smile and think of the money.

Sausage casserole

One of the more exciting things about being pregnant - (aside from the stress incontinence, which adds a not unthrilling frisson to sneezing) - is the idea that the child might inherit some useful qualities from its father's family.

For example, my husband and his sister are both amazing mathematicians. And by that I mean they've got great mental arithmetic, which is really the only cool thing to be able to do with maths.

My sister-in-law has applied her maths wizardry to playing cards, with great effect. I hear that beyond a certain element of cunning and luck, being good and consistently taking money off other people at such card games as this "poker" I hear so much about, requires a facility with maths. I don't know why, and I know it's nothing to do with 'counting cards', which I'm pretty sure isn't allowed, but I know it's the case that maths is the thing.

And she's good at spelling, too. So in all, there's very little that I can do that my sister-in-law can't.

My one tangible, definable skill is my outstanding timekeeping. I am never late for anything, ever. And I know how long five minutes is, almost to the second, without using a watch. And pretty much any time of the day, you can ask me what the time is and I'll know. But what fucking use is that? I don't want to work in a train station. And my sister-in-law has her very own watch. It is pink.

But occasionally she will ring the house looking for her brother, who will be out strangling dogs somewhere, and get me. And she'll occasionally humour me with a question about cooking.

Like the other day.

"I know what I could ask you. Do you think," she said, "if a recipe says cook a casserole on the hob for 50 minutes and you would actually rather do it in the oven, you can?"

"Yes," I replied, sounding grand and patronising. "Yes that's fine. Stick it in at 180 for 50 mins. Would this perchance be a Nigel Slater recipe from this weekend? The sausage casserole one where he - snort - FORGETS to instruct you to put the sausages back in the pan [shaking head] - I don't know..."

And she said "Oh I'm not sure. It's Nigel Slater but it might not be that one."

And I said "Well, let me know how it goes anyway."

And this is how is went:

Victoria's sausage casserole

"This one's still pretty simple. Basically, you colour up some onions in (well, this is how I did it because of not having a big enough casserole dish that cooked on the stove) - I coloured up some onions in a frying pan, chopped up some Cumberland sausages and browned them, all of that in a pan with fennel seeds, chopped garlic and a couple of bay leaves.


Then I put it all in an oven casserole dish with some chopped up apples and a spoonful of mustard, a litre of stock and some Madeira, and a tablespoon of flour stirred in. And salt and pepper of course, good old salt and pepper. Cooked that (braised? baked?) in the oven for half an hour, then added a tin of haricot beans (obviously you're meant to have dried haricot beans that you've soaked in water overnight but, I mean, LIFE'S TOO SHORT), then cooked it for another half an hour, then stirred in another spoon of grainy mustard - done. Nigel Slater might have had some other stuff in his recipe, I can't remember now, but that's what I had mine.


In the Nigel Slater version, all done on the stove, after 50 minutes the liquid should be "mostly dissipated" or "mostly disappeared" or something, so I imagined a thick stew for plates and forks.


It didn't come out like that, either because I fiddled with the measurements cos I was cooking for more people, or because he hadn't tested it properly - or just because I cooked it in the oven with the lid on, so obviously the liquid can't disappear off into the air quite so easily.


Anyway, it was very liquidy (though a nice thick liquid because of the flour) so I served it in bowls with a spoon, and granary bread to dip in - the bread dipped in the liquid was delicious, mmm."
 
I didn't ask her to send a photo too, because she doesn't even know I'm posting the contents of her email here, so I thought a photo as well might have been a bridge too far.

Chicken curry

So I made this curry last night, but decided I wasn't that crazy about it, so didn't take a photo. But then I had a bit more and thought "Actually this is great" and my husband said "Yeah it's really great."

And so I resolved to take a photo this morning. But then I forgot and turned the leftovers into a salad, so now I've got nothing to take a photo of. So here's another photo of me on holiday:




Yes I don't look too fat here until you have a look at where my back ends (bottom right)


Anyway, it was an approximation of a thing I got off River Cottage Bites and it's a nice curry although it'll make your house stink like the local Taj Star.

The really interesting thing about it is that I implemented some advice given to me, indirectly, by the film director Gurinda Chadha, who said on some cooking programme that her family always cooked chicken with the skin off. She said "I don't know why," but I do.

It's because chicken skin is unbelievably greasy and curry doesn't need to be any more greasy than it already is. So last night I skinned the chicken drumsticks before browning them as normal and the result was superb.

So here we go, the River Cottage Bites chicken curry, for about 4 people

8 chicken drumsticks (or thighs)
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 can coconut milk (I use those small turqouise ones from Waitrose)
1tsp coriander seeds
1tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp fenugreek seeds
1 tsp ground turmeric
2 tsp ground cumin
1 fresh chilli, seeds in or there's no point
1 2cm square of fresh ginger
1 small onion
salt

1 Grind together the seeds, the turmeric and the cumin and toast gently in a dry pan until the kitchen smells like the set of Slumdog Millionaire. It seems like a shiteload, but just tip it all in.

2 In a food processor, whizz up the ginger, onion and chilli to make a paste. Add some oil to the pan that the spices are cooking in and then tip in this paste. While that's cooking gently for about 10 mins, bloop into the processor the chopped tomatoes and coconut milk and whizz. Leave it there for a bit.

3 Skin the chicken and brown in a pan for about 4 minutes each side. Arrange in a baking dish

4 When the paste/spice mix has had about 10 mins, add in the tomato/coconut mixture and wibble this around until it's all bubbling. Then taste - it will be bland as hell, but spicy, so add salt bit by bit until it starts to taste like something nice. In the end I added - no joke - about four big pinches of salt, but it's best to start small.

5 Pour this mixture over the chicken and bake in a 180C oven, uncovered, for 1 hour.

Very nice re-heated, or cold. The leftover sauce makes a really delicious light curry dressing when mixed with yoghurt, cucumber and mint.