Chicken and peppercorns

I had chicken, I wanted spice and heat, I wanted to use my new chopstick set (£2 in Hong Kong). So I did a chicken-y modification of the green peppercorn tofu recipe, dredging my chunks of chicken thigh fillet in cornflour before frying it really hard in a small amount of olive oil.

The chicken came out of the pan while I made the peppercorn sauce, then went back in to heat through, with some par-cooked tenderstem broccoli. Unfortunately we were out of fresh or grated ginger, so I used a knob of stem ginger cut into slivers, and left out the muscovado sugar, counting on the sweetness from the ginger to balance it out. And it did.

Mars Bar Slice Bites

The 26th of January is Australia Day - the somewhat contentious holiday commemorating white settlement in Australia. It has become an excuse for unpleasant nationalism and racism, and I am pretty glad I don't live in Australia any more when I see some of the things that are said and done in the name of Australian "pride".

However, this year I decided that I would take something to work to show my colleagues the triumphs of Australian cuisine. I was tempted to introduce them to lamingtons - but I couldn't handle the thought of the mess. Chocolate crackles need Copha, and I don't know what the British substitute would be. Pavlova is really from New Zealand. Melting moments are too fragile too survive the London underground. So I settled on the Mars Bar Slice because it is sweet, requires no baking, is robust, doesn't need refrigeration under normal winter weather conditions and needs no expensive or exotic ingredients. And then my friend HH suggested doing them as cupcakes, which I thought was brilliant.

I followed this recipe, substituting good dark chocolate for the milk chocolate in the icing (it's sweet enough), squashing spoonfuls into paper cupcake cases, dolloping on the icing and then pressing a slice of mars bar onto the top for a garnish. Doing it this way you end up with quite a lot more icing than you need - I'd probably make 2/3 quantity to do it again. It made 14 generously-sized cupcakes, but could be very cute in tiny cases as a petit four. They were very popular in the office!

Swedish Turkey Meatballs

Heather's recent Swedish meatballs with nutmeg gravy inspired me. I used turkey mince - because I'd bought some and couldn't remember why - and did a mushroom sauce with half beef stock, half milk for extra savouriness. It was good. Would have been better with some parsley.

Whisky Marmalade

As every British foody knows, January is the fleeting season when you can get lovely bitter Seville oranges for making marmalade. You can make marmalade from lots of citrus fruits, all with their own charm (Rose's Lime Marmalade was a favourite treat in my childhood; cumquats make a very fine marmalade) but for me the pinnacle of all marmalades is Seville orange. It is tangy and very intensely orange-flavoured and just wonderful whether you eat it on toast or as part of a sauce for game.

Within the basic outline of fruit, sugar and water, there is almost infinite variation. Thick or thin cut peel, dark and bitter or light and fresh, Dundee-style or Oxford-style, with whisky, with brandy, with spices. And then there are the variations on technique - boiling whole oranges, juicing the oranges and then slicing the peel, soaking the peel, making it in the microwave, running the juice through a jellybag. And so on and so forth.

It gets even more complicated in the heady world of marmalade competitions. Rumour has it that entrants in the marmalade competition at the Sydney Royal Easter Show use a metal ruler and a scalpel to slice their peel into exactly even shreds and then use a fine needle to position the peel in the jar so that no two shreds touch.

I don't think it really needs to be said that I went to no such effort.

I like a fine-shred, not too dark marmalade (I find thick shreds fall off my toast). I followed this recipe although I didn't add any spices to it. I only did a half quantity, and even then I found it hard going! I had blisters from slicing the peel and the papercuts from my normal working week did not thank me for the application of lemon and orange juice. But the result of my toil was worthwhile - lovely fresh flavour, beautiful colour, and an excellent set.

Meatloaf

In the fridge we had some tired-looking chestnut mushrooms, a packet of beef mince, some smoked bacon rashers and an onion. And at some point between thought and action the ragu that I had planned became meatloaf.

I do like a bit of meatloaf, but it isn't for me one of those misty-eyed tastes of childhood. I don't think we ever had it when I was growing up. This staple of American home-cooking is a relatively recent discovery, which I feel liberates me. I don't have the one best way that I always do it, I can just go with my heart. And on this occasion my heart said wrap it in bacon and do it free-form.

So. The mince, the mushrooms, an onion, an egg and some breadcrumbs were seasoned generously with some smoky barbecue sauce, patted onto overlapping bacon rashers topped with slices of tomato, then wrapped and flipped to get the nice presentation side up.

A hot-ish oven and about 45 minutes cooking, then sliced and served with some of my bottled baked beans. It was good, but I think the cold slice in a sandwich the following day was even better.

Venison Wellington, or The Best Sausage Roll

On a cold night mid-week, it is nice to have a well-stocked freezer! We pull out a couple of nicely trimmed roe venison fillets, some duxelles from the last time we did beef wellington and that was very nearly it.

Browned the fillets, onto the duxelles on a couple of slabs of pastry and into the oven. The most challenging element was rolling out the pastry with my fancy French-style tapered rolling pin.

When we used to do Wellington for the family, Paul's nephew would always call these "sausage rolls". So there you go, best sausage roll in the world. But if you get ketchup anywhere near it I will slap you into the middle of next week. It gets the proper oozing of juices into the pastry, and then the crisp outside, with the meltingly tender, well-flavoured meat, given an extra breath of gaminess from the duxelles. Some nicely iron-y greens and a glass of one of the butch-er red wines are all that is required.

Pear, ginger and walnut friands

The friand (free-OHNd) is one of the triumphs of Australian cafe culture. These little, oval, almondy cakes are so good, so delicate, so French-tasting, and yet (while they have developed from the French financier, apparently) they are much better known in the Antipodes. And despite his notorious lack of sweet-tooth, they are a cake that Paul actually likes.

The downside to the friand, if there is one, is that they take 6 eggwhites. So if you've been on a custard binge, or made mayonnaise for a boat-load of lobsters (or you've been quietly stashing single eggwhites in the freezer for 3 months), I urge you to give them a go.

You mostly get plain friands in Australia, or with a few blueberries and raspberries scattered through. I usually follow a brilliant Luke Mangan blueberry friand recipe but I decided to go with some slightly more seasonal flavours and bring pears, ginger and some walnuts to the party. I also beefed up the caramellyness with a bit of dark muscovado sugar subbed in for some of the icing sugar. And they were ace.

Pear, Ginger & Walnut Friands

75g plain flour
200g icing sugar
40g dark muscovado sugar
100g ground almonds
25g walnuts, ground/chopped quite finely but with some slightly chunkier bits
1 knob stem ginger
6 eggwhites
160g melted butter
2 halves tinned pear in juice (or a leftover poached pear if you happen to have one)
12 extra walnut halves (pretty ones to garnish)

Preheat oven to 210C. Grease friand (or muffin) tins.

Sift the flour and sugars into a bowl. Add the ground almonds and walnuts.

Lightly beat the eggwhites until they are white and frothy. Stir them into the dry mixture along with the melted butter. Fold in the finely chopped stem ginger and diced pear halves.

Spoon the mixture into the prepared tins, coming up about 2/3 of the way. Top each with a pretty walnut half. Bake 15 minutes at 210C, then reduce heat to 200 and bake a further 10 minutes.

Allow to cool for 5 minutes before turning onto a wire rack to cool.

Makes 12.

These are moist and delicious as they are - this is no time to fuck around with whipped cream or fruit sauces or complementary-flavoured sorbets. A cup of tea or coffee for morning tea, or a little glass of dessert wine at the end of a meal are all that you will want.