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.)