Shepherd's Pie with Cheese-Crusted Leeks

A small twist on an old favourite, this, courtesy of Delia and her reassuringly non-bonkers How to Cook, Book Two. In our house, Tuesday's dinner is often linked to Sunday's dinner: there are only two of us, but a roasting joint worth the name will feed at least four. This in turn means there is often left-over lamb or beef, and variations on bolognese, a day or two later.

The difference in this variation comes with the topping: I read the recipe carefully to make sure I definitely didn't need to pre-cook the leeks (you don't) which I was worried might thus end up being slightly crunchier than intended. In fact they cook perfectly, effectively steaming in the moisture of the pie, I imagine, while the cheese browns on top. That was very neat, a portion of veg without the need for any extra pans, and - obviously - extra cheese, which is never something I'd reject out of hand.

I can see this being a handy dish to alternate with the River Cottage suggestion which I normally base my shepherd's pie on, depending on the presence of leeks in the rack.

Mmmm, pork chop...

I went to the butcher's at lunchtime to buy meat to have for dinner tonight with some of the rather large assortment of root vegetables that turned up in this week's vegbox (an occupational hazard of vegboxes; I don't think I'd want to be vegetarian and rely on one at this time of year, because while I never met a root vegetable I didn't like there is a limited number of main-dish uses). Normally when I do this we end up with lamb chops, or maybe sausages, but today I decided I fancied a change and bought pork chops instead.

We used to eat pork chops a lot, generally either braised with apples and cider or in a Fifties-America mushroom sauce made with Campbells' condensed mushroom soup, but somehow we got out of the habit. Possibly because it seemed to be difficult to get pork chops any more; I can remember looking in supermarkets and only finding pork steaks, which aren't the same thing at all and were no good at all when we had a dog who thought pork chop bones were the best thing ever; possibly also because we found sources of really good local lamb and started eating lamb chops a lot more instead. At any rate, it's been a long time since we last had pork chops; long enough that neither of us could remember exactly how we'd used to cook them.

We did remember having them with mushrooms, though, and that seemed like a good idea for tonight as the vegbox had also brought quite a lot of mushrooms. Googling produced Delia's recipe for pork chops baked with mushrooms and creme fraiche, which sounded like just the ticket.

Our fresh mushrooms were ordinary chestnut mushrooms, rather than wild mushrooms, but we had dried porcini and all the other ingredients. It's a nice straightforward recipe, perfect for a weekday evening when I'd been late at work and really wasn't feeling up to complicated cooking. I wasn't quite sure about the instruction to dollop the creme fraiche on top of the chops and mushrooms before baking; if I was doing it again I think I'd mix it in with the mushrooms to make more of a sauce, but we both enjoyed the end result anyway. We had it with mashed potato, swede and carrot (roughly the same amount of each); definitely a good winter dinner.

A new method for biryani

Last night I'd bought lamb for a curry with the intention of looking through recipe books and deciding exactly what kind of a curry it should be when I got home. I hadn't been anticipating not getting home until eight o'clock, though; by that point I was tired and didn't feel up to complicated cooking, so decided that I'd go for simplicity and make a lamb biryani.

I make biryanis quite a lot, either vegetable or chicken, generally following the recipe for vegetable biryani in Vicky Bhogal's Cooking Like Mummyji where the vegetables (and meat, if I'm making a chicken biryani) are cooked with spices, tomatoes and yoghurt and then layered with almost-cooked rice and baked briefly. I wasn't sure about using this method for the lamb, though, as it was obviously going to need a lot more cooking than chicken would; in the end I opted for a recipe from a very old Indian Cooking book of the kind that you used to find in supermarkets back before the Net Book Agreement disappeared and supermarkets started selling the same books as everywhere else. I'm not quite sure where it came from; certainly, neither of us bought it or remembers owning it individually, so we think it must either have been left by a previous tenant somewhere or belonged to a former housemate.

This recipe used a different technique; I fried an onion until golden brown, added ginger, garlic and whole spices (cinnamon, bay, cardamom, cloves) and then stirred in the lamb, some vegetables (peas and carrots), ground spices and yoghurt, topped it with partly-cooked rice and baked it for an hour.

It turned out very well; at least as nice as the biryani we usually have, if not better. The recipe wasn't brilliant (it showed its age in such things as calling for either ginger paste or ground ginger, and garlic paste or powder, because not so long ago fresh ginger and garlic weren't things people necessarily had in their houses, and using chilli powder where I think a fresh chilli might have worked better), but I'd definitely use the technique again.

Oranges and Lemons...Citrus-Braised Lamb Shanks

After a couple of things which were neither one thing nor the other, I thought I was due a success a) by the law of averages and b) by starting with more promising ingredients. Approaching the weekend without having already picked a new recipe, I once more chose to get something from the butcher's first and decide what to do with it later. This time, however, the intrinsic dullness of chicken breasts was fresh in my mind, so I suggested lamb shanks: a cut I have never gone wrong with, mainly because as long as you allow a good three hours cooking time, going wrong with lamb shanks is practically impossible.

This usual, and foolproof, method involves browning the meat, then adding it to a liquid which can consist of one or more of lamb stock, red wine, beer or water, along with other ingredients including, but not limited to, onion, carrot, any root vegetables which are handy, thyme or other suitable herb, and barley. Put that in a low oven for three hours and you generally end up with superbly tender meat and a rich gravy which is very much part of the dish (this is definitely a meal best served in deep bowls).

As a change, then, I picked out a suggestion from the River Cottage Meat book, for Citrus-Braised Lamb Shanks. The cooking method is the same - brown the meat, semi-immerse in cooking liquid, place in low oven for two or three hours, perfect for a weekend evening - but the difference is in the flavouring. I started by dicing onion, carrot and celery, which I softened gently in some olive oil; so far, so traditional. Then, however, I added the zest and juice of an orange and a lemon, followed by white wine and lamb stock.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall obviously has a cooker calibrated rather higher than ours, as his suggestion of Gas Mark 1/2 for two and a half hours struck me as being a bit on the ineffectual side. I turned the heat up (admittedly only to Gas Mark 2) which is what I'd normally do, and it was fine; at lower heat I'm sure it would have cooked to even greater tenderness, but we'd have been eating it for breakfast.

The end result was interesting; as I suggested, in our household lamb shanks have always been something unpretentious, slow-cooked and substantial, served in a big bowl of gravy, very much the sort of dish that seems just right for a Sunday night when there's snow on the ground. This was far more like a restuarant or dinner party dish - I served it on large plates, with lots of buttered mashed potato, and a large puddle of the cooking sauce, which was as promised, zesty and zingy, and possibly other things beginning with z, if perhaps not quite the sort of thing you'd want to eat by the spoonful or mop up with bread. However, it was also the sort of slow cooking that might seem even better if done for dinner at the end of a long summer day. I guess I'll have to wait and see if we have such a thing this year...

Dal with Chicken

Friday night is curry night in our house (unless we're out, in which case Saturday night is curry night instead). I'd bought chicken breasts at lunchtime, on the grounds that we're having lamb shanks on Sunday so it would be better not to have lamb tonight as well; originally I'd been intending to make chicken dopyaza, but then I thought that perhaps this would be a good opportunity to try something new.

I eventually settled on the mung dal with chicken in the Ultimate Curry Bible, although as we only had whole mung beans and the recipe called for split I substituted channa dal.

The cooking technique was slightly different to those I'd come across before; instead of frying the spices and tomatoes together, a few ingredients are added at a time; first ginger and garlic, then turmeric, cayenne and salt, then tomatoes, and finally cumin seed, garam masala and green chilli. Each addition is fried briefly, then you add a little hot water and cook until reduced before adding the next set of ingredients. Then you brown the chicken in the spicy paste before adding the pre-cooked dal and water and simmering slowly (the recipe said 25 minutes, but it probably ended up being more like an hour, which is never a bad thing with curries).

When I tasted the sauce just after setting it to simmer I thought this was going to be a disaster; it contained half a teaspoon of cayenne and a couple of slivers of a green chill. The current batch of chillies seems to be particularly potent and at that point the sauce was so hot as to be practically inedible to our palates. Fortunately, the long slow cooking allowed the flavours to blend and soften, and it was actually very nice, richly and complexly flavoured. We both thought it was definitely one to make again.