Coniglio alla griglia

I've had rehearsals until 8pm most nights this week and Sam has had less work on than usual. Result: I've had a row of incredible dinners cooked for me! Indeed, as I write, delicious odours of frying plaice are titillating my nostrils. This is a luxury I could get used to (although I'd better not...)

The highlight so far was last night's barbecued rabbit. Sam marinated it in garlic, rosemary and lemon (he's more into classic flavours, I'm more into exotic ones, so we balance out well). Then he cooked it on the barbecue and served it with a 'salad' of white beans with barbecued red peppers (you grill them until soft, then put them into a clingfilmed bowl to steam, then remove the blackened skins), and some rocket leaves simply dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (I recently got fed up of crap quality oil and vinegar, and invested in the real thing from the Italian deli). For a starter we had barbecued asparagus with pancetta - simple and bursting with flavour. (For all its faults, Germany doesn't half produce good bacon - knocks spots off anything you can get in Britain.) For dessert we had fresh peaches, juicy and sweet, the first of the summer.

Chicken fattee!

This was something really, really special. We had my dear friends Pierre and Eric to stay for the weekend, big foodies both, and we decided to spend their last evening cooking this amazing Lebanese recipe from my new cookbook, Casa Moro. You roast a chicken with lemon and cloves, butcher it into the 8 pieces, then layer it up on a platter with rice (jazzed up with fried onions, spices and chickpeas), tomato sauce cooked with a cinnamon stick, fried aubergine, garlicky yogurt, toasted pine nuts and coriander. The result is a grand ceremonial feast.

We followed it with an orange and cardamom-scented pistachio tart, also from Casa Moro, served with vanilla ice cream. This probably wouldn't have been the first recipe I would have chosen from the book, but Pierre was mad keen, and he was right. A buttery pastry case is spread with a gooey, fragrant pistachio paste flavoured with orange and cardamom, then baked til it forms a delectable crust. Hard work shelling all those pistachios, but eminently worth it.

There's nothing like an evening spent in the company of true friends. I can't wait to see Pierre and Eric again.

Pan fried salmon with new potatoes, peas and broad beans with pecorino, and wild garlic mayonnaise

Another winning idea from Skye Gyngell (except the wild garlic mayonnaise, which was my idea). We got some wild garlic (what the Germans call Baerlauch) in our organic vegetable box and decided this was the thing to do with it. To be honest, I wasn't wildly keen on the mayonnaise - it tasted strongly olive oily in a bit of a nasty way (maybe I used crap olive oil). But the rest was pretty sensational - especially the pea and bean salad with pecorino from the Italian deli, which is one of my favourite summer side dishes.

Meringues with rhubarb and strawberry compote

Nigella's meringue recipe from Feast, served with stewed strawberries and rhubarb. A lovely summery dessert after a barbecue (which didn't get photographed, but I can tell you that the three different marinades of chimichurri, harissa, and rosemary/lemon/garlic were pretty stupendous). Would have been even better with vanilla ice cream but you can't get any in our crap local Rewe.

Skye's cream of spinach and nutmeg soup

(The actual colour was a far brighter, more intense mossy green.)

Good old Skye. This is classic French cooking - simple, but crafted with such care and attention to fine detail. Basically all you do is cook a load of spinach until it just wilts, fry some diced shallots in butter, then blend it all up with chicken stock and pour in some creme fraiche (still can't be arsed with the accents I'm afraid - just too aufwendig on a computer keyboard) and grated nutmeg. It's actually more time-consuming than it sounds, as are most things involving a blender I find, but well worth the effort.

Rigatoni with roast tomato sauce

Roast some cherry tomatoes with olive oil and balsamic vinegar for an hour or more on 160 or so. Then pour into drained rigatoni with a sprinkling of fresh thyme and plenty of parmesan and basil. Bob's your uncle.

Octopus curry

Based on the recipe for 'Ad Hoc fish curry' in Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Fish Book, the bible of fish cookery as far as I'm concerned and much more besides. Mind you, the recipe is disappointingly anglicised - calls for 'curry powder' instead of any specific spices. So we didn't really follow it. Instead, we made a Thai-style spice paste, with garlic, ginger, shallots, coriander seed, cumin and green chilli, fried that for a minute with some onions, then poured in a bit of Thai fish sauce, a handful of lime leaves, coconut milk and fish stock (one we'd made earlier with the remains of a delicious pan-fried mackerel and a couple of massive salmon heads courtesy of Fischparadies). Once it had come to a simmer we put in our octopus along with a diced fillet of tilapia. A mere 3 minutes later it was ready to eat, on jasmine rice with a squeeze of lime juice and a sprinkling of coriander. Perfumed and wonderful.

Potato and smoked trout gratin

Three whole months since I've updated my food blog! Well, after all, there's more to life than food. But, to misquote the back of my shampoo bottle, it's a good place to start. Just now I made this potato gratin with smoked trout:

We'd just got back from a short trip away and there wasn't much food in the house, but we had potatoes, a packet of cream, and some smoked trout. So I sliced the potatoes the thickness of one pound coins and layered them up with pieces of trout in a baking dish, then poured over a mixture of cream, milk, creme fraiche (sorry, I JUST can't be bothered to go into character map and do the accents today), grainy mustard, salt and pepper, and grated some leftover manchego cheese over the top. I baked it in the oven at 190 degrees for an hour, then served it with green beans.

I was inspired by a recipe in Nigel Slater's 'Real Food' which calls for smoked mackerel, which I think would have been even better. (I also happen to know that a potato gratin is amazing with anchovies. Sounds weird, tastes great - trust me.) As we ate it on the balcony, a thunderstorm started, which made for a pretty atmospheric meal.

Meals in minutes, the Skye and Thomasina-inspired way

I decided I needed to have more instantly-edible-yet-still-obscenely-delicious food in the house. Even for an enthusiastic cook like me, there are times when you just can't be bothered, or are too busy, or too hungry, to put in the effort and time required to make a meal from scratch. But even at those times, a gourmet is still a gourmet! Thence the challenge: how to eat fantastically well with next to no investment of time and effort?

Step 1: yesterday I made Skye Gyngell's slow-roasted tomatoes. Nothing to it, really - you just get the nicest tomatoes you can find, halve them, sprinkle them with salt, pepper and sugar, and roast them for as long as possible on as low as possible a temperature (in my case 4 and a half hours at 110 degrees). Then you keep them in a jar in the fridge and whip them out as and when you need them. For me, this was at lunch today (manchego cheese, slow-roasted tomatoes, cranberry and shallot chutney, parma ham, Dunkelbrot), and at dinner tonight (which I'm coming to). I'm still planning to make Skye's equally awesome tomato and chilli jam with half of the tomatoes once I get round to buying some chillies, but at the rate I'm going I might have eaten them all before then. (Both recipes, incidentally, from the beautiful book A Year In My Kitchen.)

So, dinner tonight. I cooked some spaghetti and tossed it with two of the tomatoes, 5 or 6 anchovies from a jar, and a good dollop of Thomasina Miers' Mojo de Ajo which I'd made a couple of weeks ago (this, I suppose, was Step 2). Thomasina describes this as a kind of Mexican confit of garlic: it's made by cooking a couple of bulbs' worth of mashed garlic and a couple of chopped red chillies as slowly as possible in plenty of olive oil. It probably would have turned out even better had I been able to achieve a slower, softer cook: Cologne's department stores and cookshops don't seem to be up to the task of providing a heat diffuser. (The other day I even cooked stock in the oven because I was sick of it bubbling furiously on the stove even on the lowest heat available on our cooker. I shouldn't complain really - we are among the lucky few in Germany who have gas rather than electric...)

Anyway, the pasta - salty, garlicky, richly-flavoured - was a record-setter on both the speed and deliciousness scales. I daresay I'll be doing this again.

The chocolate soufflé...and other stories

Once again I've allowed myself to build up a terrible backlog of food blog photos. Now that we tend to keep the camera lying around in the kitchen there's no longer the danger of 'Oh, I JUST can't be bothered to photograph this, I want to eat NOW!' when the food is on the table - unless I'm really hungry, that is - but what tends to happen is that I photograph a good 10 or 12 meals before I get round to actually uploading them to the computer or posting about them.

So, without further ado, I will share with you last night's chocolate soufflé:

This delectable dessert (recipe from Aaron Cooks Italian) was preceded by a delicious vegetable stir fry made mainly by my husband. They're difficult, stir fries, I find. This time, as usual, we didn't get it quite right: there was too much sauce (the temptation to use the lovely lamb stock I'd made a few days before was too great), and the vegetables weren't quite as crunchy as they might have been. But it was still delicious. No photo, I'm afraid - we had too many food photos already!

Previously to this, a couple of nights ago, we had some memorable lamp chops from the organic market at Rudolfplatz, which I marinated overnight in a spice mix (cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, coriander, cumin - all the Cs, basically), lemon zest and garlic, then grilled on our griddle pan and served with couscous over which we poured the remains of a rather lovely Moroccan bean soup I'd made the previous night:

We had two chops each: so as to avoid the embarrassment of admitting how greedy we are, I did my usual trick of telling the butcher I wanted enough for three people, but even then he only recommended three chops! I insisted on four - and it was a wise decision!

The night before this (or it could have been after -I lose track), Sam brought home three spankingly fresh mackerel fillets from our favourite fishmonger in Cologne, Fischparadies on Weidengasse. We experimented with cooking them in a Finnish-style vinegary sauce, with onions, 'juniper' (aka gin) and mustard seed (inspired by a recipe in my number one cookbook of all time and the best 8 pounds I ever spent, Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries). Served with sautéed fennel and boiled new potatoes, it wasn't quite authentic, but it was delicious.

Whilst we're on the fish theme, I shouldn't forget the smoked mackerel and potato fishcakes I dreamed up a week or so ago. I was particularly proud of this meal for its effective home economics: although delicious, it was made up entirely of things that badly needed using up. It's probably best to gloss over the vintage of the mackerel and potatoes; to go with them, I made a dipping sauce of crème fraîche with horseradish, chopped fennel fronds, lemon juice, black pepper and a small crushed clove of raw garlic.

And let us not forget the pot roast chicken! This was a real runaway success. We'd both been ill with flu for a week, and wanted something homely, comforting and nourishing. I got out my trusty Le Creuset and made this meal-in-a-pot, with vegetables (celery, onions, carrots, potatoes) and herbs. Sam thought it was one of the best things I'd ever made.

And a day or two before that we had one of those roast pork meals. They are among the culinary glories of our household. This time we decided to photograph each element separately in order to show them in their full majesty. So, there was the Yorkshire pudding that Sam decided to knock up at the last minute (not literally, you understand):

(the leftovers of this were cleverly re-invented, again by Sam, the following night, as a kind of makeshift bacon and vegetable pie:)

There were the roasted vegetables: parsnips, carrots, onions and garlic cloves, in a honey-mustard sauce:

And of course, the majestic pork itself, with its crown of crackling. We did it sitting on a bed of halved onions, the Gary Rhodes way.

For dessert we had lime pie (recipe again from Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries), because I'd been in a baking mood.

I could go on (if I did, it would be in a vein of breadcrumbed plaice fillets with curly kale, truffle spaghetti and tomato and fresh anchovy salad), but I think that's enough for now. Right, time to go and make breakfast.

Kebabs

Sam made this one! Grilled lamb kebabs with big Turkish chillies, onions and courgettes, served with couscous and homemade baba ganoush on the side. Very delicious it was too.

As promised, the mighty fish!

I told the fishmonger I wanted a sea bream to feed two, and he must have seen me coming because he sold me this 2kg monster which was more than even Sam and I could eat at one sitting (thought we did our best). I slashed its sides and stuffed them with garlic, ginger and what I thought was coriander (it actually turned out to be parsley but no great harm was done). Then I laid it in foil on a bed of sliced carrots and spring onions, sloshed some sesame oil, soy sauce and Shao Shing (alliteration unintentional) Chinese wine over it, closed the foil parcel, and baked it in the oven. It took a whole hour before it was cooked, by which time the rice was cold, but it didn't matter. Utterly delicious.

Bacon, onion and taleggio tart

A warming winter number. (Now I sound like Nigel Slater.)

Lamb tagine with almonds and sweet potato mash

I've been going through something of a Moroccan phase lately. Have been cooking my way through a few of the recipes from Fiona Dunlop's Medina Kitchen, a gorgeous North African cookbook I snapped up for a pittance in Borders just before it went bust. There was a chicken tagine with lemon and olives, a chickpea soup with harissa, and now this meltingly sweet lamb dish. I love the way they mix sweet and savoury flavours - I substituted dates for the recommended prunes, which worked pretty well (although you had to have a sweet tooth, which I do). It's one of the world's greatest cuisines, if you ask me.

Cream of pumpkin soup in the pumpkin

Speaks for itself, really. Poured in cream, mushrooms, black pepper and gruyère, then roasted it in the oven for half an hour. Just the thing to warm up a solitary late autumn evening.

It's been so long!

I haven't updated my food blog for ages, because I'd been building up a backlog of photos for ages and then my camera card mistakenly got wiped. Bummer. But here are a few of the things I've been making recently. First, last night's delectable plum tart (recipe from Roast Figs Sugar Snow, which is quite possibly the most beautiful cookbook I own):

Time for a dinner break now (sea bass baked in foil Chinese-style with spring onions, carrots, garlic and ginger - photos to follow!)