Objection: Salad!

Steak sandwich

Cheddar and cayenne biscuits

We went to a drinks ‘n’ nibbles party at a neighbour’s house last nignt, so I made these to take over. The recipe is from Milli Taylor’s Party Perfect Bites – there’s a copy of the recipe for these biscuits at the Guardian. I love these; they’re quick, easy, and have never failed to impress when I’ve fed them to people while staring at them expectantly. That last part has nothing to do with the sincerity of their praise. I’m almost certain.

Butternut squash risotto - in a pressure cooker (!)

On a bit of an impulse, on Black Friday my wife and I ordered one of those newfangled combined pressure/slow cookers -- specifically an Instant Pot. I've owned slow cookers before, and only found them occasionally useful; but I'd been considering a pressure cooker for a while for stocks and stews and the like. This multitasker device seemed like a good tradeoff of capability and cupboard space. Plus, impulse buy (I did mention it was Black Friday, right?)

Following a few crazy weeks in work, I finally found time to try it out properly yesterday. I decided to start with this butternut squash risotto from Serious Eats.

I don't know that I would ever have thought of making risotto in a pressure cooker on my own, and it certainly doesn't feel like a remotely authentic way to make this rustic Italian food. But Serious Eats made a compelling case and it's a site I trust hugely, so fortunately I tried it out -- because it was superb.

There's two parts to this I should report on.

Firstly, there's this specific recipe. It's arguably in the a-bit-too-clever-for-its-own-good territory; it calls for butternut squash to be roasted two ways (some with garlic and apple, the rest with maple syrup), then part of it puréed and both types stirred through the risotto. Sage is fried in butter until crisp, and then the butter is browned and also goes in the risotto. There's a fair bit going on! But it was all worth it; the earthy taste of squash combined with sweetness from the apple and maple syrup and salt from the cheese was delicious.

Secondly, there's the more general concept of risotto made in a pressure cooker. The basic process is that instead of all that stirring, rice and a precise amount of stock go into the pan and are cooked for five minutes (plus the five minutes or so for it to come up to pressure.) Then the pressure is released, before it can overcook. I wasn't sure how this would work but (as you can see in the second shot above) the texture was great: the grains of rice were swollen with all the tasty stock they had absorbed, and they had in turn released lots of starch to thicken the sauce. The texture was as good as any risotto I've ever made in a normal pan.

Today we made a seriously autumnal brunch: pumpkin pancakes (flavoured with allspice, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg), with bourbon-spiked maple syrup and plenty of butter.

A technique I have been trying lately is hot-smoking corn on the cob. I fill half of my barbecue with not-too-hot coals and then leave the corn on the other half, adding some apple or hickory wood chips just as the corn goes on. I leave the lid on for half an hour or so to cook it through, then finish it with a quick sear directly over the charcoal. I find the smoke adds an extra dimension to the natural sweetness of the corn.

Meal planning is dull, dull, dull. I would much rather spend an hour wandering a market drawing inspiration from the ingredients I find than five minutes trying to draw up a list of what I’ll be eating for the week ahead. In my old job, I used to be able to go shopping at lunchtime every day, and so I never had to plan more than one day ahead. Sadly I no longer have that luxury, so now rely on online grocery delivery. This makes meal planning a necessary evil.

Naturally, being a nerd, I want to use my smartphone to alleviate some of the tedium. However, it seems I have slightly unusual requirements from a meal planning app. I say that because I’ve never found one that suits me in either the Google Play store or the iOS App Store.

What I want:

Ability to choose from favourite meals, or enter a new one.

Ability to have some meals as favourites (that hang around forever) while other meals are one-offs (that disappear once I’ve made them.)

For “meals” to just be a few words of description and nothing more elaborate. I don’t need pictures.

To be reminded which of my favourite meals I haven’t cooked for a while, for extra inspiration when planning out meals for the week.

What I don’t want:

Any sort of recipe management; I already use Paprika for that. I have hundreds of recipes in there so I really don’t want to move my recipe store.

Any sort of shopping list management; I already use OurGroceries. I find its cross-platform cloud syncing to be flawless between me and my wife, and I already have almost everything we buy in there with the correct store aisle data populated.

To be required to sort meals into “breakfast”, “lunch”, and “dinner” slots. I can tell at a glance which meals are for what, I don’t need the extra taps to tell the software.

I may write an app for this one day. In the mean time, here’s how I do it using a plan old todo list manager. My screenshot is from Google Keep for Android, but you can use just about any app ToDo tracking app you prefer; on iOS I like Clear.

Here’s my system:

I use a single note for all my meal planning. In Keep, I use the “checkboxes enabled” mode. Clear works like this by default.

I add two fixed list entries as separators to distinguish between (usually simpler) meals I have planned for midweek and (typically more elaborate) ones I have planned for the weekend. These stay in place in the list. I don’t distinguish between days within these buckets -- it usually doesn’t matter. When it does (e.g. because of expiry dates) I put the five entries under MIDWEEK in Mon-Fri order.

Next, I add one entry per meal I have planned. I don’t distinguish between dinner, lunch, or whatever. It’s almost always completely obvious. When I want to add a meal to the plan, I add a new item to the list, with whatever short description I need so it’s unambiguous to me what I mean by it. I can drag the meals into order, or move them between the MIDWEEK and WEEKEND buckets, simply by tapping and dragging.

When I’ve cooked a meal, I have two choices. If it was a one-off, I simply delete the note (using the “x” button next to “gammon, jacket potato, green veg”, for example.) But if it’s a favourite meal, that I know i want to stay in my rotation for future weeks, then instead I tick it and mark it as “done”. Keep will collect these items at the bottom of the list.

When I need inspiration for the week ahead, I browse this Ticked section, and untick the ones I want to make that week. This moves them back up to the top of the list. All I need to do then is drag them under MIDWEEK or WEEKEND, as appropriate. I do this from the bottom up, because Keep will keep the ticked items in chronolgical order, so the lowest entries on the list are the ones I cooked the longest ago. By working bottom up, I get some extra nudges to cook things I haven’t made in a while.

Finally, as an extra visual reminder, the favourite recipes that are always in my rotation are marked with a “•” character.

First outdoors grilling of 2015: tuna steak with seared asparagus, corn, and mushroom. Keeping it simple to start with although I have strong desires to do some low-and-slow barbeque this year.

The Thai-style tuna recipe came from Steve Raichlen’s Barbeque Bible, where it’s described as “pla pow.” I think that literally translates as “grilled fish” so that’s a name with a lot of latitude. This one called for the fish to be marinated in fish sauce and lemon juice; topped with deep fried shallots, chillis, and garlic; and served with a sauce of more fish sauce, lemon juice, tamarind water, and palm sugar. It’s sweet, salty, sour, and with a kick of umami – a very tasty sauce.

Moving to London has been a two-edged sword for my cooking. On the one hand, I have access to a dizzying range of fantastic produce that I could only dream of back in Wales. But on the other hand, the kitchen in our temporary apartment's kitchen is beyond tiny, I don't have any of my cooking gear, and I'm home too late and tired from my new job to actually tackle any ambitious cooking. Overall, it's a net loss, although that'll change soon when we move to our permanent flat.

Modernist Cuisine mac & cheese

This is quite a revelation. It's based on a simple idea: a cheese sauce is an emulsion, a smooth mixture of tiny particles of fat (from the cheese) evenly distributed through the water base of the sauce. But flour is a pretty poor quality emulsifying agent, so the fat particles clump together in larger lumps than we'd like, which can make makes the sauce pasty or gritty at worst. Even at best, it can still have a cloying mouthfeel.

So why not use a more powerful emulsifying agent? Modernist Cuisine suggests trisodium citrate, which is a commercial food additive. By molecular gastronomy standards, this recipe is very easy to make, requiring nothing more complex than a precision weighing scales (accurate down to 0.1 g), the additive itself (easily and cheaply available online, I paid £3 for a 500 g pot which is probably a lifetime's supply) and an immersion blender.

I've made it a couple of times now and if anything the method is more straightforward than the traditional make-a-roux, add-milk, stir-in-cheese approach. You dissolve the trisodium citrate in cold water, bring to a simmer, and add grated cheese a spoonful at a time. Between each addition of cheese you blend the sauce with an immersion blender to ensure it is thoroughly mixed. The results are glorious: a perfectly smooth sauce which packs a real wallop of strong cheese flavour. And it passes my unofficial cheese sauce test -- it's so strong it's hard at room temperature!

A simple and light barbecued dinner for a blazingly hot Sunday: Simon and Garfunkel grilled chicken (because it's seasoned with parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme...), caramelised baby leeks, caprese couscous salad. The chicken and leeks were cooked on the barbecue with applewood chips.

Tomato, courgette and chorizo risotto

Very pleased with this, I'd was craving a tomato risotto for a while and improvised this together based on what I had in the fridge. To be fair, it's hard to go far wrong with risotto...

Tried some new things tonight; no particularly recipe I was working from, I was just free-wheeling based on what I had in the fridge:

scallops stir-fried with chilli, ginger, garlic, pak choi, onion, spring onion

courgette roasted with sesame oil, soy sauce, honey, and sesame seeds

egg fried rice

Blueberry buttermilk pancakes with blueberry balsamic syrup

Man, do I ever love me a good Sunday brunch. And this is a good Sunday brunch. The Americans are really on to something with the use of buttermilk in pancakes — the faintly tart taste gives them a lot more depth of flavour.

The original pancake recipe came to me via Smitten Kitchen; this version has been lightly adapted to use UK units and pack sizes. It makes 8-10 four-inch pancakes, serving two to four people depending on appetite.

For the pancakes:

140 g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1 large egg, lightly beaten

300 ml buttermilk (one standard supermarket pot)

55 ml milk

30 g unsalted butter, melted

100 g fresh blueberries (half a standard supermarket punnet)

Stir together the dry ingredients in one bowl, and in another beat the egg with the buttermilk and milk. Whisk the dry ingredients into the wet, then whisk in the melted butter. Smitten Kitchen claims you don’t need to be too fussy about the whisking because a few small lumps won’t hurt; I’ve never noticed any ill effects.

Fry the pancakes in batches, pouring four-inch circles of batter into a pan lined with a little melted butter over a lowish heat. Immediately after pouring out each pancake, scatter some fresh blueberries over, pushing them down into the batter. It’s much easier to evenly distribute the blueberries this way than how most recipes work, which suggest you whisk the blueberries into the batter.

Cook the pancakes lower and slower than you would for thin British style pancakes, to give the leavening time to rise and the batter time to cook through. They’re ready to flip once the underside is golden, the edges are cooked through, and the still-liquid top is covered in plenty of bubbles. There’s some more tips on technique in that Smitten Kitchen post.

Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, make the syrup:

100 g fresh blueberries (the other half of your punnet)

2 Tbsp demerara sugar, or more to taste (I like 2.5 Tbsp)

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

2 Tbsp water

1 tsp ground arrowroot made into a paste with 1 tsp water

Bring berries, sugar, syrup, and water to a simmer over a low heat for five or so minutes. The blueberries should pop and thicken the syrup up. Add the arrowroot and thicken further to your preference. (Pectin would probably be the more logical choice here, but I hardly ever have that to hand.) You can use cornflour instead of arrowroot but that can make the syrup taste a little floury.

Serve the pancakes with the syrup and, for the full American diner effect, fried streaky bacon.

Update: my friend Dan adds:

Lemon, garlic, and rosemary hasselback potatoes

This is long one of my favourite ways to cook potatoes, being surprisingly easy to do for a result that looks great and is uncommon enough to impress guests. You take a baking potato, slice a bit off one side so it sits flat, then make lots of parallel cuts almost -- but not quite -- all the way through. You can put a chopstick or wooden spoon on either side of the potato and use that as a guide for how deep to cut. Then roast as with a normal potato. You get fluffy roast-potato texture at the bottom, and crisp fried-potato texture at the top.