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

Ingredients

• 2 1/4lbs (1kg) ripe tomatoes
• Fresh chili peppers (see below for details)
• 8 cloves of garlic
• 1lb 5oz (600g) Demerera or Turbinado (brown) Sugar
• 4 tbsp (60ml) Nam Pla (Thai fish sauce), Worcester Sauce or Soy Sauce
• 1 cup (235ml) Red Wine Vinegar

You can make quite different jams with different types of chili. For a pretty hot jam (the type I usually make), stick in 4 habaneros, or 4 Scotch Bonnet peppers. You can make a slightly milder jam by using 6-8 standard red chili peppers, or 6-8 jalapenos.

Throwing it all together

First, blanch the tomatoes (bring a pan of water to the boil, remove from heat and place the tomatoes in the water for a minute or two). Then peel them. Chop them into halves or quarters.

Peel the garlic cloves and place them, together with the tomatoes, the Nam Pla (or alternative) and chilis into a blender. Blend on a medium setting until the whole mixture resembles a strawberry milkshake. Yeah, really, it will. It’s a little off-putting, to be honest, but it won’t last for long…

Pour the vinegar and the “strawberry milkshake” mix into a large-ish heavy-bottomed saucepan, and then pour in the sugar – just dump it in; there’s no need to do it in increments.

Bring the whole thing to a boil over a high-ish heat, stirring constantly to completely dissolve the sugar.

Once it comes to the boil, turn the heat to low and leave the jam to simmer. There’s no need to cover the pan (and doing so will likely increase cooking time.)

From now on, stir every 10 minutes or so to keep the mixture from sticking to the sides of the pan.

You need to leave the pan at a simmer until the mixture starts to gain a jam-like consistency. This can be a little difficult to gauge on your first outing, since the jam will be runnier at cooking temperature than at room temperature. It’ll start to look a bit “jammy” even at high heat, though, and stirring it will become more difficult.

Reaching thei “jam stage” usually takes somewhere around an hour and a half, but it can vary up to half an hour either side, depending on the water content of the tomatoes. The eventual amount of jam, similarly, will vary somewhat.

Some Jam Facts/Notes

This recipe should produce about 2 medium jam jars’worth (I usually buy jars from Sur La Table or Rainbow). It seems to keep pretty well – I’ve had stores in the fridge for 6 months at a time without any noticeable harm (although it usually lasts a month, tops, before it’s all eaten!)
When first cooked the jam tends to be fairly sweet and less spicy – the heat will build up slowly for a week or so after cooking.

It’s fantastic served with cheeses (especially strong, hard cheese like good cheddar, and blue cheeses like Stilton), but also goes great with cold meats like ham. I’m told it works as a glaze for roasted/grilled meats, but haven’t got round to trying that yet.

My favourite use for it is the use which first introduced me to the recipe: Take two slices of toast, melt Stilton over each one, and then spread a thin layer of the jam on top.

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.

Since this is a recipe involving lime juice and a lot of dairy, there’s an important caveat: in general, combine dairy ingredients (milk, butter) with as many other ingredients as possible before adding lime juice as flavouring. This is because citrus will cause the milk to very rapidly curdle into a useless and disgusting-looking mess. Mixing the dairy product with everything else before introducing the acid helps to eliminate this effect.

The Boring Bits

• Serves 6-12
• Preparation time: 15-20 minutes
• Cooking time: approx. 20 minutes

Ingredients

Cupcake Batter

• 1/2 cup (113g) Unsalted butter
• 1/4 cup (60 ml) milk
• 2 tsp Dried Spearmint
• 3 large eggs
• 1 tbsp fresh lime juice (about half a lime’s worth)
• 2/3 cup (130g) Granulated sugar
• 1 1/2 cups (210 grams) all purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• zest of 1 lime

Buttercream Frosting

• 1/2 cup (113 grams) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2 cups (230 grams) confectioners sugar (icing or powdered sugar), sifted
• 2 tablespoons milk or light cream
• 2 tsp Dark Rum
• 1 tbsp Fresh Lime Juice

Throwing it all together

For the Cupcakes

Prepare a muffin tin with paper inserts, and go ahead and pre-heat your oven to 350F (175C).

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. An electric whisk is slightly less work than a hand-whisk or fork, but any will works fine.

Add the eggs and beat well so that the mixture is combined.

In a separate bowl mix the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt).

This next step captures the essence of the original vegan recipe, sounds really odd, but works pretty well. Bring the milk gently to boil in a small saucepan, add the spearmint and remove the heat. Let it stand to infuse for 5 minutes. Minty milk is not a pleasant thing on its own, but it’ll work well as part of these cupcakes.

You should now have 3 separate items – butter mixture, dry ingredients and milk. Now add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, a handful at a time, whisking after each addition to combine the ingredients. Finally, add the milk and whisk again until the mixture is smooth.

There’s no lime – an essential part of a mojito – yet! The reason (curdling) for waiting was outlined above, but you should be okay now, so go ahead and beat in the lime juice and zest.

Distribute the batter amongst your paper insert cups, and shove them in the oven for about 20 minutes. When I tried these they didn’t particularly brown, but you can test for done-ness with a skewer or a knife inserted into one of the cakes – if it comes out clean, you’re good.

Leave the finished cakes to cool completely before you top them with the frosting (because warm cupcakes melt butter-based frostings, leading to an unappeitising mess).

For the Frosting

Cream the butter, either with an electric whisk, hand-whisk or fork until it’s smooth and creamy.

Beat in the sugar in small amounts, stirring constantly, so that the mixture stiffens. Once all the sugar is well-blended with the butter, add the milk or cream and combine it well, continuing to beat for another 5 minutes or so, so that the topping becomes almost fluffy.

Finally, add the rum followed by the Lime Juice. Beat immediately and well (again, mitigating any curdling effect).

Top the cupcakes with the frosting and serve with appropriate joviality.

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.

The Boring Bits

• Serves 2-3
• Preparation time: 5-10 minutes
• Cooking time: approx. 10 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 pint (570ml) vegetable stock
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 small onion
• 4oz (110g) stilton cheese
• 7oz mushrooms (200g)
• a large dollop of sour cream
• 1 tbsp thyme
• black pepper

Throwing it all together

First, prepare your vegetables. Dice the onion, slice the mushrooms and peel then roughly chop the garlic cloves. Stilton isn’t a vegetable unless you count the blue bits, but dice it nonetheless.

Add the onion and garlic to the stock in a medium saucepan, and bring to the boil.

Once it’s boiling stir in the stilton until it begins to melt. Simmer gently for about a minute, stirring until the cheese has blended into the stock.

Now add the mushrooms, and season with black pepper. Leave at a simmer for another 6 minutes or so, stirring in the thyme when you have about a minute left to go.

Remove the soup from the heat and stir in the sour cream (feel free to provide your own idea of how much a “dollop” is).

At this point, you have a choice which provides you with two very different soups. It’s possible to serve this as-is, allowing you to savour the whole chunks of mushroom. But you can create a very different soup by sticking the whole lot in a blender (probably on the “liquefy” setting) and reducing it to a thicker, more uniform whole.

I personally prefer the colour and texture of the blended version, but the choice is yours.

Serve with whole-grain bread, and opine loudly about how any “wild” mushrooms you’re likely to buy in the shops are probably grown in the same sheds as the simple, versatile ones you’re enjoying right now.

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…

The Boring Bits

• Serves 3-4
• Preparation time: 10 minutes
• Cooking time: approx. 30 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 1/2oz (40g) butter
• 1 1/2 cups (300g) long-grain or basmati rice
• 25 floz (750 ml) vegetable stock
• 1/2 bottle of medium white wine
• 2 large closed-cap mushrooms
• 1 medium onion
• 2 large mild italian sausages
• 1/2oz grated fresh parmesan 15g
• dried rosemary
• salt & pepper

Throwing it all together

This is pretty easy to do, but it’s not one of those recipes you can put in the oven and leave for half an hour. It requires a bit of attention and a bit of sensitivity to how things are coming along.

First off, chop the onion into small pieces, the sausage into thick slices (about 3/4 inch), and the mushrooms into chunks.

Next, melt about 2/3rds of the butter over a medium-high heat in a large, heavy-bottomed pan. Now add the onions and the sausage, and cook for about 3 minutes, turning the sausage so that it browns on the outside, and waiting for the onion to just turn glossy. Add the mushrooms, and cook for another two minutes until the onion is turning transluscent.

Add the rice, and stir well so that it gets a good coating with the butter. Now pour in enough wine and stock – about half and half – to just cover the rice and get it floating. Turn the heat up slightly so that the liquid simmers, and stir frequently to keep the rice moving about.

Now comes the fun part. For the next twenty minutes or so as the rice cooks, you need to keep it topped up with liquid as it begins to dry out. You should see the grains of rice begin to plump up as they absorb the moisture, and the risotto should become heavier and creamier, the liquid around the rice turning almost gravy-like.

About halfway through the cooking time add a handful of rosemary, and (taste to make sure of quantities) a little salt and pepper.

Towards the end of cooking, the rice should become tender but still firm. Keep checking by tasting a few grains. You want a satisfying, solid consistency without any actual crunch.

Once the rice reaches this stage, let the liquid evaporate so that the risotto is nice and moist but not awash in sauce. Now stir in the rest of the butter and the grated parmesan, making sure that it all melts into the rest of the risotto.

You should now have a wonderful creamy mix almost overflowing from your pan. Serve it into slightly warmed bowls and enjoy, preferably in the company of friends who don’t mind you making lewd noises and gesturing wordlessly at your plate for the duration of the dinner.

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.

The Boring Bits

• Serves 2
• Preparation time: 5 minutes
• Cooking time: 40 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 slices of calf’s liver
• 12 smallish potatoes
• 3 cups (750ml) boiling water
• 6 cloves of garlic
• 2 tbsp of dried rosemary
• 6 tbsp of virgin olive oil

Throwing it all together

This is so easy it hurts.

Wash the potatoes (you got fresh ones, right?) and chuck them into a saucepan of the aforementioned boiling water. Add more water if they’re not covered. You want to par-boil them, so leave them at a simmer for around 10 minutes.

The garlic needs to be chopped. I find the easiest way is to place each unpeeled clove on a chopping board, place the blade of the knife flat on top of it, and press down reasonably hard. The skin should flake away as the clove crushes. Then just separate out the crushed chunks and chop them up lengthways.

Place the garlic and the rosemary in a roasting tin and mix in 4 tablespoons of the olive oil. Once the potatoes are done drain them and throw them into the roasting tin. Mix them well with the oil/garlic/rosemary so that they get a good coating of oil.

You can add a couple of pinches of salt at this point if you like – I find that it tends to make the skins of the potatoes crispier.

Now put the potatoes into the oven and roast them at 400F (200C) for about half an hour, stirring them up every 10 minutes or so to ensure they roast evenly.

After your last stir of the potatoes (10 minutes before the end of the cooking), take your slices of calf’s liver, and coat them with half a tablespoon of the olive oil each.

Brush the remaining oil (1 tablespoon) onto a grilling pan. I actually use one similar to this. The ridges in the pan will add some professional-looking scorch-marks to the meat (which is how I remember my favourite dish in London), and the fact that most of it isn’t in direct contact with the pan means that the outside won’t become tough.

Pre-heat the pan over a high heat, turning to medium once you can feel the warmth through the pan with your hand 3 or 4 inches away. Now simply place the calf’s liver onto the pan and grill for around 5 minutes (longer if you’re squeamish and don’t mind tough liver). Turn the meat every minute or so to ensure it doesn’t stick and is cooked evenly.

Once the outside of the liver has browned remove it from the pan and transfer to some plates. The potatoes should be ready at just the same time, so serve those up, discarding most of the oil. You can keep some of the rosemary and garlic – the chunks should have caramelised nicely in the oil. Or, depending on your oven, they may have burned. Throw the burnt bits away, dummy!

Now tuck in! Although there’s no sauce involved the potatoes should retain a nice moistness when cooked this way, and the meat itself requires no extra moisture.

This is an unbelievably simple meal but it makes a beautiful, rich-yet-light weekend lunch. Obviously you can increase the quantities to serve more with ease.

I should also note that, whilst liver is still available in some British supermarkets, you’re not going to find anything except the occasional pot of chicken liver in a large American store. For proper calf’s liver you’ll need to look for a local quality butcher, possibly one who specialises in foreign food like the excellent Dittmers in Mountain View.

The Boring Bits

• Serves 3-4
• Preparation time: 25-30 minutes
• Cooking time: 40 minutes

Ingredients

• 14 oz (400g) tofu, chopped into 1/2 centimetre cubes
• 6 oz (170g) onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 tsp of finely-chopped dried hot chillis
• 1 oz (28g) butter
• 3 vegetable stock cubes
• 1/2 cup (110ml) boiling water (for the stock cubes)
• 4oz (110g) finely-chopped closed-cap mushrooms
• 3 1/2 oz (100g) pine nuts
• 9 oz (250g) cashew nuts
• 3 oz (80g) walnuts, halved =or= 3oz (80g) chestnuts, halved
• 3 eggs, lightly beaten
• 2 tsp fresh basil (or 3 tsp dried)
• salt and black pepper

Throwing it all together

It’s worth preparing the nuts and veg before you do anything else, because there’s quite a lot of them.

The garlic needs to be crushed – just place the unpeeled clove on a chopping board, place the blade of the knife flat on top of it, and press down reasonably hard. The skin should flake away as the clove crushes. Then just separate out the crushed chunks.

The cashew nuts need to be finely ground. This is possible in a blender if you stop once in a while to jumble up the remaining whole nuts, but a food processor is probably easier if you’ve got one. Your other option is a reasonable-sized pestle and mortar.

The other ingredients (tofu, onions, mushrooms, walnuts/chestnuts) should be prepared as described in the ingredients list.

Now make up your stock from the cubes (alternatively you can use fresh stock if you have it, of course). Add it to a large saucepan, and then add the onions, chilli and garlic. Bring it to the boil, and simmer for about 10 minutes. There should still be enough liquid to cover most of the onions at the end of simmering. Top the pan up if it runs low.

In a large bowl, combine the tofu, eggs, butter, basil, walnuts/chestnuts, pine and cashew nuts and mushrooms. They come together best if you stir them all in with a fork. Season with as much salt and pepper as you like.

Once the stock and onion mixture are ready, fold it into the tofu and egg mixture, mixing thoroughly so that all the ingredients are evenly distributed.

(Note: it’s possible to put the mixture in a container and refrigerate overnight, if you want to prepare it ahead of time.)

Now, grease a loaf tin with some butter, and place the mixture in the tin. Frankly, it’ll look pretty unappetising at this point, but it’ll cook beautifully. Really. I promise.

Cook it for 40 minutes at 350F (180C). If you don’t have a fan oven then make sure it’s on the shelf nearest the heating element (yes, American ovens with the element down at the bottom, I’m looking at you…)

When you stick a knife or a skewer into the loaf it should come out clean, without any liquid mixture stuck to it. Leave it for another ten minutes or so if it doesn’t quite seem cooked at 40 minutes.

You can serve this with just about anything which would go with meat. Roast potatoes can be fantastic, or you can try something different. Last time I did this, I cooked it along with honey-mustard baby carrots and asparagus garnished with parmesan.

On the other hand, the first time I ever cooked it was as part of a Christmas dinner (where the assembled meat-eaters proceeded to ignore the turkey I’d spent 5 hours over, and tuck into this instead, ingrates…) To give it a more christmassy feel that time, I used the Chestnuts in place of the Walnuts on the ingredients list.

However you serve it, the veggies in your life will love you for this. Just don’t lose the recipe; they might never forgive you…