veggie2

Sometimes I get seized by a vision of something I think I could cook, that I've never heard of anybody else cooking but which feels to me like it could be really, really good. Every now and then it turns out that I'm wrong, and my crazy ideas don't add up to something delicious after all. Most of the time though, I find that I am right and I come up with something I'm really happy with, like chocolate risotto with chestnuts and pears.

For once I pretty much know how much I used of each of the ingredients, because I followed the risotto essentials from the excellent mushroom risotto recipe (one of the few recipes I've ever actually followed as such) in The Vegetable Book, by Colin Spencer (one of my all-time favourite books). This provided a good-sized helping for three people, possibly greedy people. You could probably feed four average-sized stomachs without too much trouble. I would describe this as semi-sweet - enough so that it feels indulgent, but not insane, for this to constitute a main evening meal.

• 2/3 cup of arborio rice
• 2/3 cup of white wine and/or sweet sherry
• 150g of chestnuts (100g dried, reconstituted)
• Loads of cocoa. Um, about 50g maybe?
• 7 tbs of coconut oil, or a mix of oil and butter or whatever, if you're not vegan - this may be more than is strictly necessary
• Cinnamon
• Cardamom
• 4 small pears, or equivalent
• A little salt
• The juice and rind of about half a lemon

Get the chestnuts ready to go, first - I used dried chestnuts that needed boiling for 10 minutes and then draining and clearing of a few bits of brown skin. You can probably get them in tins or roast fresh ones on an open fire, whatever works for you*. They need to be in small pieces, so break or chop them up quite finely. Once they're ready you need to chop up the pears into smallish chunks, ready to go.

Melt the coconut oil and add the pears together with the chestnuts, lemon, salt and spices, then once they've started to soften add the rice and cocoa. Mix well, so the rice starts to take up the flavours around it, then add the wine and 1 and a quarter cups of hot water, and bring to the boil. Simmer with the lid on for eight minutes, then let it stand for five. Check that the rice is well cooked - if it's not, you might need to add a little more water and turn the heat back on for a bit.

Then eat.

Note: Although this was off the top of my head, I'm not the first to have invented chocolate risotto. I'm okay with that.

*The second time I cooked this I used fresh chestnuts, which involved cutting little crosses in the top, boiling them for about five minutes and then carefully peeling them. The result was much the same as I got with the dried chestnuts.

Halloumi as a substitute for bacon in vegetarian cuisine

How does one follow a writeup⁽¹⁾ by sneff? The gorgeously alliterative, adjective ridden, textbook example of gourmet noding. It feels like trying to replace a Billie Holiday song with a rock and roll band... Then it came to me - what would a modernist do? Ditch the flowers, kill the sublime similes and long sentences and make the whole thing clipped and staccato like a Raymond Chandler novel... Hard boiled cheese. There will be no "drizzling"; let's begin.

The first time I laid eyes on Halloumi the cheese was being sold on the side of greasy kebabs and falafels in a North London takeout. There's a cultural difference in streetfood between this city and the rest of the UK. Outside the South East the corner shops and restaurants are typically owned by South Asians - Pakistanis, Indians, Ugandans and Bangladeshis. As a kid I remember considering falafel a strange foreign delicacy - I don't feel like that anymore. In The Big Smoke, these immigrant retailers are all some variant of Turkish origin; I never can tell if it's Kurdish, Cypriot or Thracian (each has their own ghettos) but they're defiantly Turkish.

I live in one of these Turkish ghettos. At the end of my street is the most militantly international supermarket I've ever seen - tea smells, I buy okra and artichokes there, they sell fourteen different varieties of Halloumi and have a baklava counter. Six months ago a guy got attacked in the alley out back by a gang - he took a blow to the head with a hammer - but mostly the residents here are families who keep to themselves. The people are the sort that tend their gardens to cover the subsidence and the disintegrating brickwork. It almost works. Some don't bother.

Sneff has discussed the unusual reaction of this cheese to heat: a white goat's cheese that is almost never served raw and softens then broils when heated. I used to grill it in 7.5mm thick slabs but the difference between undercooked and burnt tends to be less than half a minute, and on the grill it catches too easily. Now I pan-fry in olive oil until the outer skin is going just past scorched and into charred (sneff's mistaken, lightly golden lacks the necessary crispyness, it needs a little charring). When the oil gets really hot the halloumi sweats like a boxer in a tinfoil suit. The moisture bleeding out causes the pan to spit and yesterday came an epiphany - this was like bacon in the key respects.

Sliced pig has a history as the breaker of vegetarians' will, with the smell of bacon dragging them back to omnivorianism. The result is a big market for fake-bacon processed substitutes, but substitutes sit badly with the current fashion for gourmet food, and many bacon dishes are abandoned for lack of a classy replacement... Fried halloumi is something that pulls all the necessary triggers: the saltiness, the fattiness and the texture. True, the flavour isn't quite as strong, but halloumi is a damn absorbent cheese. Marinated or particularly smoked (flavouring it the same way as bacon) it takes on the necessary bite.

In Britain it's often treated as a meat-substitute without people considering its unique properties. The rubbery, chewy texture means it's used along with portobello mushrooms as a staple at showier barbeques. Soaked in a nutty red-wine sauce, then rapidly seared above hot coals halloumi can work an afternoon of sunshine and beer. As a bacon substitute I've now tried a few ideas: in a BLT sandwich with pert and vulgar cherry tomatoes, it's good. In a fried breakfast halloumi sits beside the beans and mushrooms with dignity, very good. In my kitchen at breakfast a steaming, thick, gritty mug of Arab coffee completes the Aegean effect. The coffee must be pulled from the stove as the briki begins to boil over, with a substantial head of foam.

It would be simplistic to call this a straight substitute in the way Quorn or tofu often are - halloumi's behaviour is unique enough that it will shade any context in which it's cooked - but halloumi can take bacon's place and push a dish in a new and interesting direction, like changing the bassist in a jazz quartet. It's a delicious and unusual substance. In the mouth it emits a fiercesome squeaking as you bite down, arguably the noisiest food I've ever eaten, and the salt means it should be eaten with a drink on the side.

Below is a recipe that was not developed with bacon in mind, but it is a favourite and I know it makes good use of the halloumi. It is a varient on Oolong's tasty Spicy fried potato with garlicky mushroom spinach but where Oolong swings towards Indian food, my area is more Mediterranean and North African. This meal is good for two - serve to a breathtaking dame with violet eyes and skin the smell of summer.

Grilled halloumi on onion-spinach with harissa rice

serves two

• Halloumi (about 100g)
• Spinach (half a bag, around 125g)
• Cashews (a small handful)
• Fresh basil leaves (a small handful)
• Onion (one small, you have discretion to swap this for garlic)
• Harissa paste (harissa comes in a a lot of forms, I have a grinder that I use mixed up with a little tomato puree but I recommend a concentrated form rather than a condiment)
• Sundried tomatoes (about 5 decent sized, soaked in olive oil)
• Chestnut mushrooms (4 substantial mushrooms)
• American long grain rice (quantity discretionary)
• Olive oil (a slug, still in the barrel)

Harissa rice

Whether you boil or use a rice-cooker, this recipe is quite so fast (about 12 minutes in my hands) that you must put the rice on at the beginning. I choose American long grain because I like something dry and starchless with oily vegetables, but this choice is discretionary. Once the rice has boiled and drained add your harissa. I use a teaspoon of paste. Stir the whole mixture well until it's a pale shade of pink with spicy flecks. The main dish is only lightly seasoned, so the supporting carbohydrates should be noticeably harissa flavoured.

Grilled halloumi on onion-spinach

Chop the halloumi into slices approximately 6mm thick, but be careful with the slice size; halloumi has a habit of splitting so try to keep it in one piece. Wipe the halloumi on both sides with olive oil then dry-fry on an already hot frying pan until the edges are dark and crispy. Remove from the heat and set to one side. Once this has cooled, cut the resulting slices into chunks of about 2cm size.

The sundried tomatoes are a suitably Mediterranean oily vegetable to add at the end, if you can get your hands on preserved artichokes in oil these are also good. Slice the tomatoes into slivers a few millimeters wide, if you can and do get them chop the artichokes into quarters.

Dice the onion fine and slice the mushrooms thick, then begin to fry the onions in a large frying pan or wok. This is Mediterranean cuisine and the secret is to use a lot of olive oil - don't be a coward. I've cooked this recipe more than twenty times, and half the time I use garlic, the other half I use onion. It's really up to you which you prefer with your spinach but garlic can overwhelm the other flavours. Once the onion or garlic is beginning to go translucent, throw in the mushrooms. It'll be two or three minutes before the mushrooms have lost their moisture and taken on a greasy appearance.

Throw the basil in with the spinach and start feeding this leafy mass into the pan, a matter of waiting for it to wilt and then adding more, stirring constantly. When this has shrunk down to a dark green juicy-leafy concoction chuck in the halloumi chunks and the cashew nuts. Give it long enough now for the cashews to absorb a little oil and the halloumi to crispen along the cut edges and warm back up.

When cooked, take off the heat and throw in the tomatoes and artichokes, mix and serve. I tend to serve this dish in a wide bowl on top of the harissa rice. Grind some coarse pepper and salt on; your aim is for strong discrete flavours. Present.

Now settle down with a chess problem, put two fingers of Scotch in a short glass, and digest...

Jerusalem artichokes are strange looking purple-skinned, knobbly tubers, something like enraged ginger roots. After you've attacked them with a vegetable peeler, which you don't always have to do you can just scrub vigorously, you'll uncover white flesh with a texture similar to but softer than a potato. After you've cooked them, you'll find their flavour is delicately nutty and sweet. Roasting brings out their gorgeous flavour and leaves you with delectable melting flesh; braising allows you to meld their sweetness with slightly stronger flavours; making soup presents you with all sorts of opportunities.

And making soup is very easy.

Easy actually wasn't at the top of our list of requirements when we made this. Rather, we needed a starter for an alcohol-rich Sunday lunch at the end of a cold, wet November. That it didn't demand anything more difficult than chopping, and could be served with lots of bread and a salad as a main course were bonus features. What won us over were the subtle flavours.

Ingrediments to serve four

• 1 medium onion, chopped medium-fine
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• Oil or butter for frying
• 750g (1½lb) Jerusalem artichokes, peeled or scrubbed well, depending on your fancy, and chopped into ½ inch (1cm) chunks
• vegetable stock
• 1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, chopped
• salt and pepper
• 1 large glass of white wine, something soft and fruity, we used a Chenin Blanc
• 2 tbsp double cream

Method

Melt a large knob of butter with a splash of oil in your stockpot, or whichever large recepticle you favour for soup-making. When hot, add the onions and garlic and fry gently until the onions are glassy. That should take three or four minutes.

Add the Jerusalem artichokes and move them around the pan. Cover and allow to soften for five or ten minutes.

Cover the vegetables with stock. As per usual, we didn't exactly measure it, but you are probably looking at a quantity somewhere around two pints, or one litre. Season with salt and pepper and add the rosemary. Reduce the heat, cover, and allow the Jerusalem artichokes to cook to a point where they can be squashed against the side of the pan with the back of a wooden spoon. Say around 30 minutes.

At this point, it is time to liquidise. DEB favours a hand-blender, LPM prefers the food processor method, but we shan't be standing over you in your kitchen, so we shan't complain if you use a liquidiser, either.

If you used a food processor or a liquidiser, return the soup to the pan, if you didn't use one of those, you won't need to return it to the pan. Well, unless you spattered it all over the walls, but then you have a slightly bigger task ahead of you. But you should add the wine, and some more stock if it's too thick, and then check the balance of flavours. It should be delicate, with the fruityness of the wine lifting it. Add the cream, and the flavours will be neatly rounded.

That, then, is that. Enjoy!

DEB

I realise this is going to sound like hyperbole, but I feel like my brain is melting from the sheer deliciousness of my supper, so I thought I'd better write it up before I forget.

You will need:

• Some potatoes (I used two medium-large ones, cooking for myself - I have a big appetite)
• Onion (I used two small, but one medium-large would be fine)
• Cashew nuts (I used a big handful of broken ones, which I can get cheaper from the Indian shop)
• Curry leaves (use fresh if you can get them - I swear to God they smell exactly like Heaven when they're fresh, but they're still lovely when they're dried so don't worry about it too much)
• Mustard seeds (your standard accompaniment to curry leaves)
• Cumin (the one spice I most hate to do without)
• Chilli powder (if you like chilli heat - any other source of this will do just fine)
• Oil (I used mustard oil, which probably helps, but don't worry about it too much)

• Spinach (half a bag for me, i.e. around 125g)
• Garlic (I think I used five cloves, but I'm a garlic fiend fighting off a cold)
• Sesame seeds (go with almost everything, but especially garlic)
• Mushrooms (three chestnut mushrooms for me, could use more, could use less, could even do without)
• More oil (not very much)

Dice the potatoes, and heat them quickly to soften them up for frying - I zapped mine in the microwave for five minutes, never let anyone tell you microwaves have no place in proper cooking. Boiling would also work, obviously, if that kind of thing is your bag. Or you can just fry them for a really long time.

Slice the onions finely, and heat the oil in a big frying pan or similar. It should be good and hot to begin with. Chuck in the cumin and mustard seeds, and then add the onions and curry leaves once the mustard seeds start to pop. Wilt the onions a bit before you stick the softened potatoes in there - if they're just starting to brown, that should be fine, but remember they'll need to stand up to the entire frying time of the potatoes.

When the potatoes have been in for a few minutes, turn the heat down to medium-low and add the cashews. If you're not into cashews, or you just don't have any, I'm sure sunflower seeds or sliced almonds would be fine. You should probably add something that's pleasantly nutty though, you'll be missing out if you don't.

The potatoes shouldn't need more than the occasional stir from this point on, so get chopping that garlic. Garlicky spinach is a thing of great joy, so I recommend not being too much of a wuss about how much garlic you use. I think it's best chopped up really finely, but honestly garlic is great however you cook it, so do what you like.

Add the remaining oil, sesame seeds and garlic to a saucepan on medium-low heat. Let them brown a little while you wash the spinach and then shake off the excess water. If you're feeling energetic you could also start on the mushrooms at this point.

Next you need to add the spinach to the saucepan - it'll look like loads of it, but soon it'll hardly take up any space at all, I can never get over how much spinach reduces and frankly I could probably have eaten the entire bag without any problem. After that the mushrooms should be finely sliced and added as soon as possible - neither spinach nor mushrooms take much cooking at all, but neither will be ruined by prolonged gentle simmering, either, so you could even add them the other way round, I can't see it making much difference. Probably best not to cover the pot, you don't want it all to be too soggy.

At this point you're really just waiting for the potatoes to get as brown and crispy as you like. I for one like my potatoes pretty damn crispy, so it took me a while. Watch that the cashew don't get burnt, they're quicker to cook than potatoes.

Serve with salt, maybe a bit of pepper. I had white pepper on the spinach, and chilli powder on the potatoes. A slice of lime wouldn't go amiss either, I should think, but I'm all out.

That's it. Enjoy!

Say 'quiche' and everyone thinks 1970s buffet lunch: a little bit passé and a little bit gauche. We're not convinced that's an entirely fair judgement. What's not to like about taking just about any combination of flavours that piques your fancy, covering them gently with a blanket of custard, and baking in a pastry crust? You can make it as simple or as complicated as you want, and use as cheap or as expensive ingredients as you want. You can then serve it hot, warm, at room temperature, or cold. Really, this is all kinds of win.

When we first served this, which was at a buffet for quite a few people, the menu plan said nothing more than 'leek and cheese quiche'. Credit must go to Neal's Yard Dairy, in Covent Garden, whose staff spent a good twenty minutes in conversation with DEB and let her try all manner of their produce, before she settled on a Childwickbury goats' cheese. For those of you not fortunate enough to have Covent Garden five minutes' from their office or liberal access to small Hertfordshire cheesemakers, you're looking for a light, fresh, firm goats' cheese, to complement your tender, young leeks, both of which will have their flavours accentuated by the addition of lemon.

If you want to make your own shortcrust pastry, go right ahead. If you prefer to use ready-made pastry, we won't tell.

Ingrediments serves eight to ten as part of a buffet

• 3 long thin leeks — sliced (preferably in ½ cm (¼ inch) rounds, but we're not too fussy)
• Knob of butter — be generous
• 200g (7oz) goats’ cheese — in ½ cm (¼ inch) cubes
• 500g (1lb) short crust pastry — store bought or homemade (there'll be some spare, freeze it, use it to make jam tarts...)
• 3 eggs (although we happened to use 2 whole eggs and 2 yolks, because they were kicking around and needed a good home)
• 350ml (12floz) full-fat milk
• Rind of one lemon

Method:

Preheat your oven to 180° Celsius.

Melt a generous knob of butter (really, this recipe comprises pastry, full-fat milk, and cheese, you will not save your arteries or cholesterol level by skimping on the butter), perhaps with a splash of oil to prevent it from catching, in a large pan. Toss in the leeks, mix about to coat them with fat, and let them cook gently until soft and beginning to caramelise. This will take around 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, roll out your pastry to approximately 5mm (¼ inch) thick and use it to line a 24 cm (9½ inch) flan dish, trim the excess from the sides, prick the base all over with a fork, and blind bake. We couldn't find the DEB-family jar of rice and pulses that is used for the purpose, it must've got lost in the recent house-move; so a slightly smaller flan dish was shoved on the pastry, instead. 20 minutes in a hot oven.

Pour the milk into a measuring jug, beat in the eggs, add most of the cheese, season with salt and pepper, and grate in the lemon rind.

When the pastry shell is ready, remove from the oven, and remove the baking beans, selection of old rice and pulses, small container, or bag of crushed child, that you have been using to weight it down. Replace with the leeks, and then pour over the egg/milk/cheese mixture. Add the rest of the cheese in places where it's looking a little under-represented, and then return to the oven for about 40 minutes. When it's cooked the custard should be set, but still give to your touch, and will have a golden tinge.

We said it serves eight to ten people as part of a buffet, but it might serve a single, very hungry person. If you're lucky.

DEB