Gruyere Cheese Risotto

This sounds like overkill, and I will admit that it is rather rich, but that makes this perfect comfort food, think of it as the more elegant cousin of mac & cheese.

There is a misconception that making risotto is challenging, that it requires skill or talent, this couldn't be any further from the truth, what it does take is time. Yes, it does require almost constant stirring, but very little concentration, and I find there to be something quite soothing and therapeutic about the constant stirring, it can be immensely relaxing after a long day.

Melt a large knob of butter, with a little vegetable oil to stop it burning, in a large frying pan, and cook some spring onions until soft and translucent. Add the arborio rice to the pan and keep stirring for around a minute. Add some wine and a teaspoonful of mustard, and let the wine cook down until it has been absorbed by the rice

Make up the vegetable or chicken stock, and turn up the heat under the rice. Add the stock to the frying pan, and stir the rice until the liquid is absorbed. You can either make up the stock in a saucepan and add it with a ladle, or you can make the stock in a jug, and pour it in. I prefer the latter, but both methods are perfectly acceptable.

Keep stirring in the stock until it has all been absorbed and the rice is tender, this should take about 20 minutes. When the rice is cooked through remove it from the heat, and add the cheese, folding it into the rice until all the cheese has melted.

Serve on warmed plates or bowls, sprinkled with a little chopped chive if wished.

ingredients

1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 finely sliced spring onions
300g arborio rice
125ml white wine
1/2 teaspoon french mustard
1 litre hot vegetable or chicken stock
125g chopped gruyere cheese
chopped fresh chives (optional)

Chicken and Bacon Pie

I am always looking to try new recipes, and the genesis for this dish came from a leaflet my friend picked up at the supermarket. My mother has made pies like this for years, mostly using swiss chard or spinach, and a cheese, often mozzarella. This simple but comforting dish is almost embarrassingly easy, and makes a great standby supper.

This dish is similar to the pies my mother used to make but with a vaguely more complicated filling, though it is still fairly manageable. What is also great about this pie is that it can be made in advance and stored, ready to be cooked in the fridge. You can also make a vegetarian version of this pie, using quorn chicken and omitting the bacon, though you will need to add more liquid, as not only will the quorn not give out any liquid, on the contrary it will soak it up.

Start by preparing and dicing the chicken thighs, and chopping 4 rashers of streaky bacon, and browning them in a pan with a little olive oil and some thyme leaves.

When the chicken has browned add two tablespoons of plain flour, and stir vigorously until the flour has combined with the juices. Pour in some white wine and allow it to bubble for a few minutes.

Dice the mushrooms and make up your chicken stock, add both to the pan and allow it to simmer until the sauce has thickened and the mushrooms are tender. At this point the chicken should be cooked through and there should be no pink. Remove from the heat and add the creme fraiche, stirring to combine.

While the filling is simmering roll out the puff pastry to slightly larger than your dish and cut a cross in the middle to let the steam escape. Ladle the pie filling into an ovenproof dish, and cover with the pastry, folding the points of the cross over to make a square hole. Fold the excess pastry over to make a border and crimp the edge with a fork. Brush the pastry with milk.

Bake the pie in a 200 degree oven until the pastry is golden and crisp. Serve with mashed potatoes made by mashing peeled and boiled potatoes with the leftover creme fraiche, season well.

ingredients

olive oil
4 rashers smoked streaky bacon, chopped
6 boneless chicken thigh fillets, diced
2 sprigs thyme
2 tbsp plain flour
100ml white wine
300ml chicken stock
250g button mushrooms
4 tbsp creme fraiche
1 pack puff pastry
2 tbsp milk

Pesto Alla Trapanese

This is quite possibly the most traditionally italian dish I have ever written about, and the only changes I have made are to use ingredients commonly found outside of Italy.

This dish originated in Sicily, as so many great italian dishes do, and is essentially a sicilian version of pesto, which originates from Genoa. The basil of Pesto alla Genovese is substituted for tomatoes, and instead of pine nuts, almonds are used instead.

Start by cooking your pasta, you can make the sauce while this is cooking. I like linguine with pesto, but spaghetti will work just as well.

To make your sauce finely chop a small handful of salted roasted almonds. You can also use raw nuts, but I prefer the rich flavour and saltiness of these almonds, which are usually used as bar snacks.

Also chop a handful of sultanas and a few cloves of garlic, throw all of these into a small hand blender and add a large glug of olive oil and a healthy pinch of salt and pepper. Throw in a few teaspoons of capers, I absolutely adore these so I tend to add quite a lot. Finally add about half a can of chopped tomatoes, and blitz until the mixture has a smooth, fudgy texture.

Drain your pasta and add the sauce to the pasta in the saucepan, off the heat, stir to combine and to warm the sauce, and serve, topped with a basil leaf, if you wish.

This sauce is almost embarrassingly easy, and like all good pasta sauces, it can be made while the pasta is cooking. It is refreshingly different to pesto, having a more subtle flavor, and more body than Pesto alla Genovese.

ingredients

500g linguine
3 cloves garlic
1/2 can chopped tomatoes
25 grams sultanas
2 tablespoons capers
60ml olive oil
salt & pepper

Sausage Traybake

I can take absolutely no credit for this wonderful recipe, my friend Alice made it for me for the first time last week, and was entirely taken by it.

Traybakes are perfect for students as they are relatively cheap and very easy, given that you can basically put everything in the oven at the same time. This tray bake is a wonderful combination of flavours, and might even be able to convince the average student to eat a vegetable occasionally.

You can use pretty much whatever sausages you want for this, thyme and rosemary sausages work especially well. Even vegetarian sausages will work, though you may need to add some liquid to the tray if you do this.

Start by roughly dicing your potatoes, and put them in the bottom of the pan with some olive oil and seasoning, stirring to coat the potatoes. Prick the sausages lightly with a fork and coat them in oil, strip rosemary needles from the stalk and crush a few cloves of garlic and sprinkle them over the potatoes and sausages. Roast in the oven on a medium heat until the sausages have browned slightly.

Peel a red onion and slice it into eighths, sprinkle it over the sausages, and return the tray to the oven. Finally dice some button mushrooms and add them to the tray with some cherry tomatoes and a little more oil, until the sausages have cooked through and have browned, and the potatoes are soft in the middle.

Ingredients

9 sausages (or 3 per person)
300g potatoes, diced
1 red onion
200g button mushrooms
a handful of Cherry Tomatoes
olive oil
salt & pepper

Macaroni & Marmite

You will either love or hate this recipe, and thankfully I love it. There is something about this salty umami dish that I find intensely comforting. Like most of the dishes here, it is almost embarrassingly fast to make, requiring you to only spoon a few ingredients over the pasta and melt it together.

The seed of this idea comes from an episode of Nigella Bites I watched months ago, probably whilst sprawled hungover on the sofa in a slightly stained silk kimono watching food network. It is essentially just a riff on noodles in butter and cheese, with the addition of some yeast extract.

The first step is to cook your pasta, according to the packet instructions, when your pasta is cooked drain and return it to the hob with the heat off and add about a tablespoon of marmite and a large knob of butter, and stir together until both have melted and combined.

Grate in a little parmesan allowing it to melt and then stirring it into the hot sauce. Serve and top with a little more grated parmesan.

ingredients

150g Macaroni
1 large tablespoon Marmite, or to taste
1 large knob of butter
4 tablespoons grated parmesan

A British Institution

Cooking a roast dinner can be fairly challenging, and I give great amounts of kudos to all the women (or men) all over the British Isles who cook a sunday roast every single week, for it is no mean feat.

I have been meaning to cook a sunday roast with my friends ever since I moved back to the UK over a year ago, and this week I finally got round to it. The real challenge of a roast is making sure that everything is ready at the same time.

The first thing you should cook is your protein, we opted for chicken, stuff the chicken with a lemon, that has been skewered with a knife and with a few thyme stalks, and top with thyme sprigs, oil, and salt and pepper, massaging the oil into the bird.

Prep your veg. Quarter and parboil the potatoes, cooking them until they are still firm, but are almost cooked through. Toss the potatoes, and other root vegetables in oil and seasoning, and cook them separately in the same oven as the bird.

Now you can turn your attention to your green veg, I cooked broccoli and green beans, separate the broccoli into florets, top and tail the green beans, and set them aside ready for cooking later. Around now you can start making your yorkshire puddings, I have already detailed how to make the perfect yorkshire puddings here.

Finally, you just need to cook your green veg, and make your gravy. Lightly steam the broccoli florets until they are tender and cooked through. Cook the green beans in lightly salted boiling water, and when they are cooked drain them, and add a large knob of butter to the pan and a few cloves of crushed garlic, stirring until the butter has melted and been infused with the hot pungent garlic.

Finally, make your gravy, you can do this one of two ways, if there are no pan juices, you can just use granules, which will make a perfectly fine gravy, or you can deglaze the pan in which the chicken was cooked.

Add the drippings with a little white wine. Slake a little flour with some stock and add it to the pan. Reduce over a medium heat, whisking in some stock if needed, until you have a thick and luscious gravy.

Getting everything adequately cooked, and ready at the same time is no mean feat, luckily the only items which require any precision are the chicken and the yorkshire puddings, with everything else you have a fair amount of leniency.

All thats left is to enjoy this british institution, perhaps with a glass of chilled chardonnay and a board game.

ingredients

1 chicken

oil

salt & Pepper

A few sprigs of thyme

1 lemon

1 kg potatoes

500g green beans, trimmed

1 kg parsnips

1 head of broccoli

1 recipe yorkshire puddings

The Perfect Yorkshire Pudding

My grandmother always made wonderful yorkshire puddings, light and crispy they are a must with any roast dinner, and are a quintessential comfort food for many people.

You'll have to forgive me the slightly hyperbolic title, of course there is no such thing as a perfect yorkshire pudding, everyone's tastes will be slightly different, but these are pretty good nonetheless.

There are a few secrets to follow when making yorkshire puddings, and if you follow these you should have no trouble making them, and your puddings should rise every single time.

Start by making your batter, this is very simple as it contains basically three ingredients. Eggs, milk and flour, with a dash of salt. Recipes vary on how many eggs to use, I say that 2 eggs for about 12 yorkshire puddings is right, not too rich, but enough to give them lift.

My first tip is to let the batter rest before you cook it. About half an hour minimum, what I generally do is make the batter before I start cooking a roast, and leave it in the fridge until it needs cooking, this usually gives it about an hour of resting.

Fill the wells of a muffin tin with about a centimetre of sunflower oil, or alternatively with beef dripping. My second tip is to heat the fat in the tin until it gets really really hot, and starts to smoke. It needs to be so hot that when the batter is poured in it starts to bubble and spit, and rises up the sides of the wells.

Put the tray with the batter into a hot oven, for 20 minutes. My third tip is to leave the oven door closed until they are fully cooked otherwise they will start to sink, the batter will fill with grease and they won't become crisp.

Remove them from the tray with a fork, and serve with a roast, filled with gravy.

ingredients

115g plain flour
pinch of salt
2 medium eggs, beaten
290ml milk
vegetable oil or dripping for cooking

Pasta with Deconstructed Pesto

This is a great pasta dish to make for a late night supper in summer, when you have really fresh basil. So it is without irony that I made this dish last on a cold and rainy february evening.

The concept of this dish, is that it contains all of the same ingredients as pesto, but rather than blending them, they are added to the cooked pasta individually and the flavours are allowed to meld for a few moments.

The great advantage of this dish is that it takes no time to prepare, you can literally prepare the ingredients for the sauce while the pasta is cooking.

Start by cooking your pasta, I prefer to use macaroni for this dish, but you could also use penne or fusilli. While the pasta is cooking roughly chop some fresh basil and sprinkle it with salt. Peel and chop or crush 2 large cloves of garlic.

Drain the pasta when it's cooked and return it to the hot pan off the heat, add the basil and about 2 tablespoons of good quality olive oil stirring to combine, add a small handful of pine nuts to the pan and grate in some parmesan, stirring until it combines to form a cohesive sauce.

Serve steaming hot, preferably curled up on the sofa, topped with more parmesan and some freshly ground black pepper.

Ingredients

150g pasta
30g fresh basil roughly chopped
2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
4 tablespoons of freshly grated parmesan plus more to garnish
a small handful of pine nuts
salt & pepper to taste

French Onion Soup

This is one of my favorite soups, and one of my favorite recipes to make. It truly does have a great wow factor, and is wonderful served either as a starter, or alternatively as a lunch. Personally I find that there are few things more luxurious or more simple than sitting down in the living room of my parents house in Paris on a rainy afternoon, rain lashing on the veranda with a bowl of warming onion soup.

My recipe is very simple, some recipes add alcohol or vinegar to the stock, some even add bacon changing the nature of the dish entirely. It is also possible to top the soup with a poached egg as is often done in belgium, however here I prefer to top the soup with the more traditional gruyere toast.

This recipe should feed around four people. To start off finely chop a whole kilo of onions and fry them in a generous quantity of butter, sprinkling them with a generous amount of salt to ensure that they don't brown too deeply. When they have softened and turned slightly translucent cover with 500ml of stock, you can either use vegetable stock, though beef stock is traditionally used (and no, I don't and have never made my own stock).

Simmer for 15 minutes until the flavours have mellowed and the stock has darkened. While the soup is simmering, thickly slice a baguette and place it under the grill on a baking tray until it has toasted lightly, flip and toast the other side. When the soup has simmered ladle it into ovenproof bowls and top with the toast. Top with grated gruyere cheese (though you could also use emmental or cheddar) and place under the grill until the cheese has melted and browned.

I must credit my mother for providing the recipe and I will confess that I don't often make it at home, as my version pales in comparison to hers, which uses fat white onions from the garden, and crusty french bread direct from the bakery, however don't let that put you off making this classic dish, one of the simplest soups to make, and wonderfully comforting and warming.

Ingredients:

1kg Onions
50g unsalted butter
500ml stock
1 baguette
200g Gruyere Cheese

Pea & Leek Pasta Risotto

This is a little gem of a recipe, and part of the reason that it is so wonderful is that everything that you need for this dish is non perishable, and will keep for at least a month in the fridge. This makes this a great standby dish. You will need a specific type of pasta for this recipe, often called orzo, which is often used in soup, and which is shaped similarly to large grains of rice. This pasta is cooked in a frying pan, rather than a saucepan, much like a risotto, but it has an advantage over risotto because it doesn't require stirring. I must credit Nigella Lawson for the inspiration behind this recipe, as I often do, which I have adapted slightly since I discovered it a couple of years ago.

Firstly chop your leek finely, and fry it in a scant amount of oil in a hot frying pan, seasoning lightly. Add two large handfuls of frozen peas to the pan, and stir allowing them to soften slightly in the hot oil. At this point, if you like you may add some pancetta, finely chopped to the pan, and allow it to brown. Pour the orzo pasta into the pan, and put the kettle on to boil, stirring the frying pan to mix. Add the boiling water to the pan and turn the heat down to a medium low heat.

After about ten minutes most of the water will have evaporated and the pasta will be tender, start stirring to ensure that the pasta doesn't stick and take the pan off the heat. Add a large knob of butter to the top of the pasta, and allow it to melt, making the pasta slight and glossy. Finally add some parmesan cheese and some freshly crushed pepper, stirring to combine.

I can't state enough how charming this recipe is, it's perfect for a weekday dinner curled up on the sofa and eaten out of a bowl in front of the television.

Ingredients

olive oil
1 leek
150g pancetta cubes (optional)
150g frozen peas
boiling water
250g Orzo pasta
salt & pepper (to taste)
parmesan cheese (to taste)
large knob of butter