I’ve been meaning to post this recipe for about 2 years, but somehow it’s never actually happened before now. It’s become a favourite old standby, the only condiment I always have in my fridge, and the recipe I most frequently pass on to friends (usually after rifling extensively through age-old email archives – another excellent reason for sharing it on the web.)

It’s based loosely on a recipe that Simon posted to london.food a couple of years back, but has been through several cycles of, uh, “maturation” (mostly simplification) since then.

The Boring Bits

• Makes 2 medium jam jars’ worth
• Preparation time: 30-40 minutes
• Cooking time: approx. 1 1/2 hours

I saw the idea for Mojito cupcakes a couple of months ago on Slashfood, and was intrigued immediately, but didn’t have time to bake anything back then. A friend’s birthday a few weekends back seemed like the perfect opportunity to try out the idea, so I took a look again at VeganYumYum’s original page on the subject.

There were a couple of problems with just following the recipe, though. Firstly, VeganYumYum’s page wasn’t so much a recipe as a suggested modification to a recipe – specifically one from the book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, which I don’t have. In any case, trying to follow a recipe whilst also following suggested modifications is kinda tricky (as we discovered). The original recipe was also vegan. Now, I have no real problem with vegan food, but I find Soy Milk to be kinda revolting, and on the rare occasions that I like to bake, I’m a bit of a traditionalist about it. I may try the vegan cupcake thing in future, but not this time around.

So the end result was that we found a “Full fat” Vanilla cupcake recipe and set about modifying it according to the Mojito idea.

What follows is a single recipe which (eventually) worked.

A quick, simple but very satisfying soup, this.

Surprisingly there are very few recipes for mushroom and stilton soups available online, and most of the ones there are seem… wrong. This one borrowed a few basic ideas from Phil Vickery’s recipe, but dispenses with the “wild mushroom” crap.

I’ve no idea why food writers and celebrity chefs the world over will only touch a mushroom if it’s some fancy-schmancy “wild” variety. Bog standard closed-cap mushrooms aren’t highly exciting, it’s true, but they have a wonderful subtly complex flavour and, to my mind, actually work better in a soup like this where the stronger flavours of mushrooms like shitake can end up fighting with each other, and with the other principal ingredients.

Sorry, boastful as it sounds, but it really is that good. I don’t often exclaim out loud over a meal, but this really was amazing, and I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

I can’t take all the credit – it’s based on a recipe from Nigel Slater’s Appetite, a food book (not quite a recipe book – he’s deliberately non-prescriptive about the way you cook things) which everyone everywhere should own. I just tarted it up a bit , primarily by adding meat and booze, the two essential ingredients of most meals made in my kitchen.

This is not a strictly “authentic” risotto. Italian food purists would likely have a lot to say about its deviation from the norm. But hey, as long as they sit around sulking about it that leaves a second helping for everyone else…

I should point out (as well as asking you to excuse my dodgy Italian) that this isn’t actually Antonio Carluccio’s recipe for calf’s liver, but it’s something I cook from time to time which, for me, recaptures my favourite dish from long hung-over lunches with my friend Max in the Islington branch of Carluccio’s restaurant.

What’s that? Calf’s liver? Yes. Fegato is calf’s liver.

Living in California, the pervasive attitude of horror that Americans have towards offal is a source of endless amusement to me. Even more amusing is the peculiarly American euphemism “variety meats”, which leaves me with a mental image of a beefsteak in a top-hat singing vaudeville tunes.

Liver, done just right, has a fantastic melt-in-the-mouth texture and a distinctive, rich flavour which is hard to beat. It’s also full of nutrients.

Anyway, this is how I capture the London/Italian way of serving it.

Okay, Okay, so the title is a little boastful, but whenever I cook it people fall in love with it and beg me for the recipe. So here it is; you can stop begging now.