A sandwich

You know how sometimes you have to call a friend, and you keep putting it off, for good reasons, then bad reasons, then no reasons other than the thing is spiralling out of control, and you end up resenting this person you’re not calling? So it was with lobstersquad. I was looking for something I really wanted to blog about, and not really finding it, but then, reading the Wednesday Chef, I was led to a flummoxing article.

And then I thought, you know what, I might as well write something after all.

That post, which you can read here if you like, is about someone who has decided not to cook because she forgot to put salt in some galette she was making. The galette came out fine, but it was not the galette to end all galettes, and she had failed to make all her friends wither away in envy of her Instagram feed, and so she’s going to live on olives and prosciutto for ever and ever amen.

I can’t even begin on how crazy I find that. Instead, I will tell you about the lunch I made on Saturday. I, too, had decided not to cook, but just for that morning. But because I am the boy scout of fridge maintenance, and have become, now that I live in the North Pole, an avocado curator, I knew that a world class sandwich was within reach.

First I had to go to the shop and buy some fresh bread. Not mindblowing artisanal bread, of course. Supermarket mini ciabattas, of the sort that look a bit rubbery but come to life with a couple of minutes under the grill.

That, filled with thinly sliced leftover steak, wedges of avocado, pickled cucumber, a squirt of lemon and a dash of hot sauce, was all. A bag of salad was emptied onto a bowl, and dressed with the last of a bottle of vinaigrette I make in batches.

It was very quick, it was beautiful, and it made perfect sense, and if it wasn’t cooking, it wasn’t turning my back on it, either.

So there you are. 

Ginger scallion sauce, again.

I wrote this post back in the summer of 2010. I basically hated that whole summer but this ginger scallion sauce is one of the few good things I remember from back then.

I still think it's pretty great, and make it often. A bit after reading Francis Lam's article, I saw a similar recipe in the  Momofuku cookbook. It's even simpler, just spring onion and ginger and salt and oil, with a small dash of Sherry vinegar. It's good, but I prefer the taste of cooked spring onion. I also find that it's so moreish that if I make a whole big batch that is supposed to keep in the fridge, it disappears in a single meal. And that's a lot of oil for a single meal. 

So here's what I do now. I cut up a few spring onions, just the green bits, until I have what I need. I chop or grate some ginger. Put both in a mug with some salt, cover with vegetable oil, not even enough to cover. And give it a minute in the microwave.

This is very fast, I don't need to bring out the machinery, there is no bubbling oil, and the sauce is still terrific. Have it on plain Chinese egg noodles, with a splash of hoisin sauce, as David Chang says in the book, or on anything, really. Best-fast-food-EVER. 

(Choice of illustration entirely random, a page I rather like from my current sketchbook)

Dolce far niente cooking

This post can be considered to close a trilogy dedicated to summer cooking.

There is non-cooking, almost non-cooking, and then there is get-out-of-jail-free-card cooking. By which I mean, tin opener cooking, or twist of the wrist cooking, which is, in fact, not doing anything cooking. Dolce far niente.

The stuff in your store cupboard. The special stuff that you buy on holiday or in that cute, expensive deli, and then don't use because it's, you know, special. And you like the look of those labels, sitting so prettily next to the rice and the garbanzos, and like to think they make your larder look like Elizabeth David's.

This is the time to go for them. Toast bread, slice tomatoes, open tin, and there you are, dinner.

I now have a box that is super extra special and that I really am rationing like a castaway. It came all the way from Sicily, from Fabrizia Lanza (you know her from this earlier post, and this one, and this one), and is chock full of gorgeous stuff. Dried tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, dried herbs, tangerine jam, all done with produce from the kitchen garden at the school. I did the drawings on the labels, so there's an element of shameless self promotion, but not much. This, like the best Italian cooking, is all about the ingredients.

I could only wish that it was still hot enough to warrant that kind of lazy cooking. I fear Scotland may be lapsing into its usual weather. Hearty soups are only around the corner. Sigh. Let's have some of that Sicilian sunshine in a jar, then.

Lentils, pressure cooked.

I guess now is not a very good time to convince people that pressure cookers are perfectly safe, convenient little gizmos that don't explode. They really don't, you know, unless you make them. 

But I can see that the image problem is not likely to go away, so I suggest we call them express pots, like we do in Spanish. Olla Express, now, isn't that a gadget you'd be glad to use? Dear manufacturers and marketers, you are welcome to the idea. I am a pressure cooker evangelist and will be glad to have more converts to the cause.

So, anyway. The recipe. Lentils, cooked until just al dente, well dressed with a punchy dressing and a few crunchy things. It may be one of the perfect side dishes, and is one of my favourite things for lunch. You'll probably only find Puy or so called Puy lentils, but of course I would recommend Spanish pedrosillanas for this.

Here's what you do. You take your express pot (see what I just did there?) and put in a cup of lentils, a bay leaf or a good pinch of dried oregano, some salt, and perhaps a garlic clove or a shallot. Salt is controversial so you can do without and use it later, if you prefer.

Add water to cover by three centimetres/an inch. Lock the lid, bring up to pressure. When it's up, give it two minutes and turn off the hob. Now let it come down naturally for ten. Don't leave it longer or it will turn into lentil stew, which is fine but a different thing.

When you open it, drain the lentils but reserve the liquid, plus a couple of spoonfuls of lentils. 

Put these lentils in a pretty bowl or plate, and while they're warm, dress them. Olive oil and lemon for starters, and then any or all of these, well chopped: capers, shallots, dill pickles, parsley, almonds. You may want a touch of mustard, perhaps some sherry vinegar, probably some black pepper. See how you like it, and try it once again before you serve because they soak up the dressing a lot and you may want more oil or lemon or salt.

I love this with another salad of beets, or grated carrots. And boiled eggs and brown bread, or smoked mackerel, or these sausages. Anything, really.

Next day, a soup. I know you´ll think that that muddy looking liquid is ugly and useless, but trust me.

All you do is chop some celery, onion and carrot into little dice. If it makes you feel better by all means call it mirepoix. Sweat this in a little oil or butter or both, inside your express pot (ahem) and add the lentils and liquid, plus a cup or good stock, if you have it. If not, water with a bit of good stock powder will be fine, or just water, but the real chicken stock brings it up a few notches.

Bring up to pressure, give it three minutes. This is an understated soup, but very good. It has more heft than just vegetables, but is way gentler than all lentils. Put some lemon juice and some Sherry there, too, and perhaps a few fresh herbs to brighten the colour. It is just the thing for these spring days that are always colder than you hoped.

Let's give pressure cookers a good name, go on.

Summer salad

Just a salad. Words that strike dread into my heart. I've written about this before, but it bears repeating: if you have artistic tendencies, or think you may have, ask for help. Don't take it out on a pile of defenseless greens, and start flinging things at them until they are smothered in bits and bobs.

Yes, if salad is going to be the meal, it can't just be a sliced tomato.  I know it's too hot to cook actual food, and it makes sense to make the most of fresh summer produce and a couple of tins. Fine. But that doesn't mean it should have seventeen ingredients. It just looks messy and tastes messy, too.

Why don't you make two, or even three, salads instead? I looks beautiful, lavish, fills you up just looking at it, and takes a little more time to prepare, but much longer to eat.

A combination I like is a bowl of green lettuce and ruccola, perhaps. Tossed with this dressing, with perhaps a tiny bit of raw garlic and some chopped nuts.

In another bowl, tomatoes, just like that, with a drizzle of oil and some salt. If they´re good tomatoes, they need nothing more.

A third can have the heavy duty stuff: the boiled eggs, tuna, olives, asparagus, etc. Placed side by side, drizzled with a simple vinaigrette, or perhaps one that you have made creamy by adding some mayonaise.

Doesn´t that look pretty? Toast some bread, open some wine, enjoy the summer. And if you´re somewhere northern and blustery, have a hearty pudding afterwards. See the advantage where you can.

Noodle soups

Yes, Scottish weather is back to normal, which is to say, cold. Which is to say, soup. Remember that chicken I wrote about, that I poach with no particular purpose in mind, and stash in the freezer in handy 500 ml containers? Here it is again.

It can be broth, chicken sandwiches, risotto, risotto soup. Or  maybe made chicken pie, or chicken and dumplings. All these things are lovely, but they are a bit…I won´t say boring, of course, but staid. Pale in colour, gentle in taste. Wonderful in every way, but about as exciting as an afternoon on a cushy sofa re-reading Georgette Heyer.

Let´s look to Asia, then. And let´s be broadminded about this, ok? Don´t beat me up on regional stuff. I´m Spanish and I add a dash of ketchup to my gazpacho, so I´m pretty sure there are things going on all over the world that would shock the recipe police.

Here´s the game. You have chicken broth, and you have poached chicken. You only need noodles to make noodle soup, and a few bits and bobs to make it interesting.

Quantities are imprecise, not because I want to be annoying but because leftovers are not an exact science. You have to wing it with what you have.

The simplest is to heat the broth, add a pinch of sugar, lots of fish sauce, lime juice (or lemon), chilies and ginger, and pour it over noodles and the chicken. A few sprigs of herbs to make it pretty and that´s it. I sometimes cook the noodles inside the broth, but that´s false economy. It really is better to boil them apart. And as for the herbs, whatever you have. I hate cilantro, so tend to use parsley, or chives, or mint, or all three. 

As far as I can tell, that puts us in or near Vietnam.

Another one I like is to heat the broth, dissolve a heaped spoonful of miso and let some wakame seaweed swell. Boil noodles (and they should be ramen noodles, but anything goes, and actually fresh spaghetti work very well) float chicken. Poach an egg, directly in the soup if you like, and serve, with some nori, a bit of chopped scallion for colour, and, if you have it, that moreish sichimi togarashi.

Would a Japanese granny approve? Who cares.

Prettiest of all is this third option, flirting with Malaysia or Thailand. Boil noodles in a pot, rice noodles for preference.Heat another  pan and fry some Thai red curry or  tom yum paste.  I add more ginger because I really, really love ginger. Add the broth and coconut milk, fish sauce, lime or lemon juice, chili, etc. Tweak and see how you like it.

At the last minute add the chicken and some frozen prawns, and when the prawns are done, so is the soup.

I like to add peanuts and fried onions (from a bag) and any pretty herb I have. In fact, it´s so hearty that even if there is no chicken it´s more than fine. And if you have little or no broth, make it less soupy and serve it over rice instead. 

The great thing about these soups is that they are just as good for any weather, so don´t feel you have to wait for the nippy winds of the North Sea to have a go.

Gnocchi di ricotta

One thing that immediately strikes one on arriving in Italy is that everyone is beautiful. And nobody is fat. How is this possible, in the land of gnocchi (not to mention dried pasta, and pizza, and ice cream, and every other damn thing)?

Well, the answer, as you might expect, is that, A/ they eat small portions of pasta as a primo, and B/They take a lot of excercise, much of it in the shape of dodging Vespas and waving their hands.

This quantity makes a starter for four. You don´t want to gorge on gnocchi, just to have a small bowlful and then go on to something else. Just make sure that the something else is wonderful, because these babies are a pretty hard act to follow.

As taught by Fabrizia at the Anna Tasca Lanza school, they seem a little bit intimidating. For starters, the day begins with a morning trip to see the ricotta being made. A sheep farm on a hillside, bees buzzing, almond trees in bloom, sheep and lambs milling about, and, once inside, the shepherd, in pristine white,  stirring a cauldron of whey and milk. Milked that very morning.

A spoonful of that stuff will quickly convince you that nothing you have ever had before is ricotta, if this thing is ricotta. And these gnocchi are mostly ricotta, so it seems a no go.

Well, despair not. I have made these with the so-called sad supermarket ricotta available in Aberdeen, and I can assure you, they are beautiful. 

You can also try them with requesón, as made with this recipe. It´s not ricotta, but it´s a fresh  cheese that everyone is calling ricotta, so why not?

So anyway, the way to make them is to mix 250 gr. of ricotta with an egg, two tablespoonfuls of grated Parmiggiano and 3 tablespoonfuls of plain flour. This makes a paste that looks delicious but you doubt will ever hold any shape. But it will. I am very clumsy, and my sous chef is three years old, and yet we make very passable gnocchi.

Now put a big pan of water to boil.

The thing to do is sprinkle your work surface with flour, and put a spoonful of the mixture on it. Roll it to make a long shape, then cut it into gnocchi. Lay them aside on a floured clean kitchen towel, and work quickly to make the rest. 

Then put them gently into the boiling water and wait for them to start floating up. When you can fish them out from the surface, they´re cooked.

Douse with herbed butter, or tomato sauce, and eat straight away.

If it seems to you that I have been a bit cavalier in my explanation, let me point you towards Nicky and Oliver´s blog. They have photos, and you can see the whole process very well. Or, take a look at Béa´s. Not that her food is ever less than spectacularly pretty, but it might help.

I promise, it´s very easy and much quicker than you´d think.

Sicilian orange and fennel salad

I'm having a slight case of blogger's block. I want to write about my trip to Sicily, but it's hard to know where to start. I´m still taking it all in, and somehow homesick. It sounds silly, since it´s not my home, but we were make  so welcome by Fabrizia that it felt like it.

I thought I would mention a few dishes, and maybe round it off with one of the recipes, but I couldn´t choose. We went through such a whole lot of stuff, from deceptively simple fried vinegary sardines to the baroque multilayered fantasy of cassata to potatoes in saffron that were just like the papas en amarillo I know from home. Every kind of food, in every note accross the scale. What would I write?

Then it occurred to me that a common theme in all those meals was the salad. There was always a salad of some sort, served on a moon shaped plate. We never had the same salad twice, I'm pretty sure,  but the point of them was always the same: to provide a  crunchy, fresh, almost discreet relief from the fireworks in the main, round, plates. Like the clowns in the circus,  coming between the high wire acts.

Of course these salads were all made from whatever there was in the kitchen garden. Right now, in early spring, that means fennel, frisée, wild radish greens, perhaps, and citrus: oranges, or some special salad lemons, or both.

Now, I live in Aberdeen, which puts me very, very far from that horticultural idyll. When I say "whatever I can find"  I don't mean whatever there is in the garden, but whatever they have in the supermarket. And let me tell you, that can often mean, "not much".

So when I made myself a salad of just oranges and fennel, with some some parsley leaves added for colour, I though, this is never going to cut it . But you know what? It was beautiful. Fresh, and sweet, and crunchy and yes, it took me straight away to Sicily. So if you'll forgive me resorting to the clichéd quote, it was a case of changing things so they would stay the same, and it worked.

I will be blogging more about our trip to the Anna Tasca Lanza cooking school, but also be sure to check out what Béa, Nicky and Oliver, Melissa, Keiko and Chika post. Prepare to swoon at the pictures, and to develop strong cravings for ricotta in all its forms.

Nostalgic Sicilian salad, for one

Half a fennel bulb
One orange
A few parsley leaves
Olive oil, salt, pepper

Shave or slice the fennel as thin as you can. Cut the orange over it, so not a drop of juice is lost. The shape doesn't really matter (to me, anyway , since I have the advantageof drawing my food). Leave the parsley leaves whole.
Now sprinkle with salt, drizzle with oil, crack a bit of black pepper and that's it.

Grilled bacon open sandwich

Bacon is pretty much guaranteed to lift any meal out of the hundrum shallows. You knew that already.

However, did you know about this nifty little trick, buried in a page on vegetables in An everlasting meal? It´s very simple: you broil/grill very thin sliced bacon directly on top of a slice of bread or toast. Witness the genius. All that lovely lovely bacon fat seeps directly into the bread, and it doesn't matter much that only the upside is crisp because the underside is cooked and mingling with that bread already. 

It is perfect. In the book you´re supposed to cook some garlic to spread on the bread, but that´s just gilding. However, if you happen to have a jar of the magic onion jam in the fridge, it will be very very good, and much easier.

It is very very quick, easy, there´s little cleanup and you´re guaranteed a wow, even if the only thing else is a bowl of leek and potato soup, or a mound of slaw. And If you serve that bacony bread on the side of a mountain of garlicky greens, expect a ticker tape parade at least.

Merluza en salsa verde: hake in parsley sauce.

Merluza en salsa verde is hake in green sauce, but Spanish green sauce is nothing like Italian green sauce. Same words, wildly different concept. Theirs is punchy and zingy and bright, ours is sedate and quiet to the point of dullness. You can add clams and shrimp as much as you like, it´s not an exciting dish.

It´s old fashioned , but the ingredients are too expensive for it to have peasant cachet. We are deep in bourgeois cuisine, and to make things worse, the sauce is thickened by flour. Beyond the pale, really.

Comfort food doesn´t not come more comforting than this, though. White fish, poached in a parsley sauce, over white rice, is perfect for frazzled minds or recovering stomachs. It´s very easy to make, and quick, and so soothing and calming that it might very well put you on the way to recovery so fast that you´ll be wanting that brash Italian salsa verde next.

The classic fish to use is hake, but any white fillet you can find will do, and if it´s more sustainable, so much the better. I have qualms when I buy hake, but here it´s a cheap, unwanted fish, which is weird and I just can´t pass it up.

So anyway: coat the bottom of a skillet with oil, add some chopped garlic and when it dances, chopped parsley. You can add a bit of butter and some shallot and it will be inauthentic but wonderful.

Now a spoonful of flour. Once it dissappears, begin adding stock little by little. It should be fish stock, but vegetable or light chicken or even water is fine. It will thicken, you will stir, add more stock, thicken again, and so on until it will not thicken more, and you will have a thin but recognizably saucy sauce. Now let it cook for a couple of minutes, add your fish, cover and wait until it´s cooked through.

If you have clams then add them with the fish, but remember they hold a lot of liquid so do a thicker sauce.

Serve over rice, plain steamed white rice. Nothing else. An orange afterwards, at most, and maybe some mint tea. This is a quiet, serene meal.

Peanut butter and caramel popcorn

I read this recipe inThe Kitchn, and it scared me by the copious amounts of peanut butter and sugar and honey. But the idea of peanut butter popcorn danced in my head all day until there was nothing to do but get into the kitchen and adapt.

In the interests of research I have popped many bowls of popcorn, and remain unconvinced about the best microwave method. So far a big paper bag with plastic clips, or a bowl topped with clingfilm have worked best, but stovetop remains supreme.

My children are very small, though, so microwave it is. Likewise, I make the sauce on my own, well away from little critters who might jump up and down excitedly and burn themselves with caramel.

I leave them to pop the corn and feel proud of themselves.

Once you have the sauce you simply pop the corn whichever way you like, and pour the sauce over. This is more than enough for two 1/4 cup kernel batches of popcorn, but that´s because I like to taste the popcorn more than the sauce, which to me is a bonus treat more than an overall cover.

You choose how you like it best.

To make the pb caramel:

Put 1/3 cup of sugar in a pan with a couple of spoonfuls of water. I use brown sugar but caster is fine.

Stir it over a medium fire until you have caramel, which is when it bubbles like a witch´s brew and smells like heaven.

Add 1/3 cup of peanut butter (smooth, without sugar) and stir until it´s dissolved.

If the sauce looks too thick add some water until it´s how you like it.

The good news is that it keeps in a jar just so, and that it´s just as wonderful over ice cream, or fruit, or pancakes, or, you get the picture. I dare say this isn´t even very good news.

Also, it´s vegan, so go ahead and pour it over banana ice cream when you entertain people of that persuasion.

Pasta with broccoli, anchovies and pine nuts.

I made this pasta when I was in Spain last. We´d had a long meeting, were hungry and, as Monday is not a good day for bars and restaurants, decided to go to my friend P´s house. "We can have pasta", she said, "although there´s nothing in the cupboard". Aglio olio, I thought, happily, for I love me a good aglio olio.

Turns out that P´s "nothing" is a broad, sweeping comment. There was oil and garlic, of course, but also broccoli. And a further rummage around netted anchovies, almonds and raisins.

Almost all the ingredients of one of the first dishes I ever learnt how to make, from a Sardinian flatmate in my university days.

Happily for my slapdash blogging methods, it is a sister recipe to this one of a few weeks back for pan steamed broccoli, so kindly read that over first if you need to.

While the pasta (long, ideally, but anything goes) boils, you cook the broccoli, with crushed garlic and a tin of anchovies, and add the raisins towards the end. The original calls for capers but I hardly every remember them.

If you can be bothered, toast pine nuts, or almonds, as it was what we had, in a separate pan. Get someone else to lay the table, not forgetting a bottle of oil, a pepper mill and some parmesan and the grater.

When the pasta is al dente, grab it with tongs or strain it, but make sure there´s some water, which will help to make a sauce. Put it in the frying pan with the broccoli, toss it well, then put it in a bowl.

My secret touch is a lump of butter tossed at the end, when the pasta and broccoli meet. It is not essential but helps it out no end.

Scatter the pine nuts or almonds over and eat away.

This is as popular with starving students as with startup app developers.

Cheese and apple toast

I think often think back to when my kids ate everything, and I was pleased. Their father was ecstatic. So much so that he gloated, and was heard boasting that Pía preferred broccoli to French toast. And so of course, smugness brought us down. I warned him, but to no avail. Now they eat nothing.

That is, they eat pasta and toast, and fish fingers, and eggs, and bananas and sometimes tinned peaches. And blueberries and mango (expensive little critters). Nutella and ice cream, need I mention. Pizza, sometimes. Chicken, in some incarnations.

At nursery they eat a whole lot of other stuff, but at home, that´s it.

So I´m very happy to have found that they like this cheese and apple on toast, which I like to call (forgive me) Newton´s rabbit, it being like Welsh rabbit but having apples, and so, you know.
I took the idea from The River Cottage Baby and Toddler book, an infuriating volume chock full of dishes my children would run a mile from.

However, this they like, and it´s easy and actually delicious, which makes it an excellent bet for sudden adult hunger pangs on a near empty fridge, or for bulking up a meagre bowl of soup.

Just grate an apple, some cheese of the Cheddar or Manchego type, cover a slice of toast, grill/broil it until brown and crunchy and that´s it.

The ultimate chorizo sandwich

A chorizo sandwich, as sold in every bar and corner shop across Spain, is nothing more than chorizo slices, sandwiched between bread. The quality of the chorizo and the bread, and the generosity of the perpetrator are the only factors that change.

So it´s not a very good sandwich, really. One dimensional, at best. Inedible, at worst.

Unless you take a little bit of care, and then it is pretty darn tasty.

You need a baguette, a ciabatta or a small loaf of good bread.

You need some proper ibérico chorizo, sliced thin. And it has to be eating chorizo, not cooking chorizo.

Then, taking inspiration from the Majorcan way with sobrasada, you need hot mango sauce, or, failing that, apricot jam mixed with chili sauce.

Heat the oven to 180ºC. Spread the cut baguette with the sauce, layer a fair amount of chorizo slices (be generous. think about your arteries some other day). Close it, wrap it in foil, squash it a little and put it in the oven.

Take it out when the outside is very crunchy, 15 or 20minues. The orange fat will have oozed from the sausage, mingled with the hot, sweet sauce, and soaked the bread.

So far, so heavenly.

But to take it up a notch, serve alongside "ensalada de matanza". This means "pig-killing salad" and is a Spanish slaw, served in Escolástica´s village at matanza time.

Slice some cabbage as thin as you can, and dress very simply with olive oil, salt, Sherry vinegar, a dash of powdered cumin and crushed raw garlic. Not too much of any.

This will provide crunch and freshness, and make the chorizo sandwich into a balanced meal. Or almost.

The 40 second egg

We came back from Spain on Wednesday; a twelve hour trip, all told, with a three year old and a one year old. Luckily they slept on the plane and were quiet in the car, but it never pays to take chances with dinner and so I chose the easiest, fastest option: eggs.

In Scotland you can buy free range eggs at gas stations, which is very handy in these situations. In Spain anyone clueless enough to need stocking up at gas stations is reckoned to be so slack that they´ll to put up with battery farm eggs, so that was lucky.

Pía likes a soft boiled egg with her face painted on, but Pepe takes his scrambled, and for him I use the express microwave method. Adults can wait the full three minutes it takes to scramble a couple of eggs, but one year olds must be appeased FAST.

So: take a microwave safe mug. Crack an egg into it, grate some cheese and beat it. Give it 30 seconds, take it out, beat it again and give it another 10. Voilà, scrambled eggs. Not the creamiest, of course, but more than ok for the little banshee banging his fists on the highchair.

Anchovy pizza

Summer=hot=kitchen off limits. Or something to that effect, no? I seem to remember having lived like that, once, before moving to the northernmost reaches of human habitation.

Ordering pizza in summer makes sense, not just because you don´t want to go into the kitchen but also because you have a higher chance of it arriving still hot.

Just be smart and order the margherita, then trick it out yourself. Our favorite lately is this simple and this good:

Crush a garlic clove, mix it with the olive oil from a tin of anchovies, add chopped parsley and cracked pepper (no salt). Drizzle this over the pizza, lay the anchovies on it.

Now, for the most important step: put the pizza on a wooden tray, or board. Give everyone tea towels if you don´t have cloth napkins. Serve with ice cold beer or good wine, and you´ll be laughing.

Chickpea and stuffed pasta salad

A great salad, easily made from ingredients from the pantry, and long lasting fridge goodies. You can see my own (far from perfect, of course) pantry in Lydia´s blog, which features a section called "Other people´s pantries".

This has become my get out of jail free card. Whenever I have to make a meal for the four of us in five minutes, counting from putting my key in the door to sitting down at the table, this is it.

I know purists scoff at supermarket fresh pasta, and yes, I know it´s nowhere nearly as good as home made fresh pasta, and lacks the toothy character of good dried pasta. But that doesn´t matter here; what matters is speed. Provided you boil the water in an electric kettle, the dish is done in three minutes flat. You have time to lay the table, but only just.

The only non-negotiable ingredients are a packet of stuffed fresh pasta, whatever you like, and a tin of chickpeas. One packet is too mean, but two means waiting a long time for the water to come to the boil, and anyway the mixture of grain and bean is a winner.

While the pasta boils, open the tin, drain it, put it in a big bowl and begin the dressing. By far the easiest and tastiest is pesto, which you should always try to have on hand, as it´s a lifesaver. If you don´t, mix garlic, oil and whatever herb you have. Cooked broccoli or spinach, or jarred sun dried tomatoes, artichokes, olives...all these things would not be out of place, but be restrained. People tend to let their imaginations run away with them in pasta salads, and anyway you only have literally two minutes to do this.

Drain the pasta, toss, serve with more olive oil and a hunk of parmesan to grate at table.

I works well with beans, too, can be made ahead and doesn´t suffer much in transport, which screams "picnic".

Broccoli cheese sauce

My mother, of course, knows best. And she told me, loud and clear, "don´t have children". But I did.

And now I have to feed them, which I never thought would be too hard. Ha.

I know the first rule is "don´t take it personally", and I try not to. And they look pretty robust, so I´m not worried. It´s just annoying that they refuse meatballs and pizza, with scorn I used to reserve for liver or limp cabbage.

But anyway, this sauce passed muster yesterday, so I´m sticking with it for a while. My ennervating kids don´t mind the taste of broccoli, but at some point a colour bar was raised, and they look on anything green with straight out loathing. Luckily, broccoli stalks are white, and so, here goes:

Sneaky broccoli cheese sauce for toddlers

Steam a couple of head of broccoli; the florets like that, the stalks peeled and diced roughly.

Once tender, blend the stalks with some cheese until you have a cheesy, whiteish, surprisingly tasty sauce.

Pour over pasta, hope for the best.

Spanish Rice, pressure cooked

Mystery solved. Laura of Hip pressure cooking asked me for a recipe for Spanish rice, and I was flummoxed. There´s no such thing as Spanish rice in Spain, I said, and gave her a recipe for arroz caldoso, which is Spanish, and rice, and very good.

Then, a couple of weeks ago I started to cook a rice that I call Emma´s rice, and then I understood. Emma is from Ecuador, so to me this is a recipe from far, far away, but in the USA Ecuador and Spain are just as Spanish. So we have a winner; a simple, winsome rice-and-chicken dish, easy to make and, in the pressure cooker, lightning quick.

And very much by the way, I have finally succumbed and opened a Twitter account, since two children, a job, a husband and two blogs weren´t enough of a drain on my time. You can find me as @Marujapolar.

Spanish rice

Chop onion, red pepper, garlic small and sautee them until the onion is transparent.
Next, turn some chicken pieces, the size of a walnut, in this mix. You can brown them if you like but I don´t bother. Pour a glug of Sherry or white wine and let it bubble away.
When this is ready, add two cups of washed and drained long grain rice and let it soak up this goodness.
Now you can put in a few saffron threads and some turmeric, or nothing at all if you don´t want a yellow colour.
Add two cups of broth, close the lid.
Give it three minutes under pressure and let it come down for seven more.
Open the lid, fluff the rice, throw in some frozen peas that you´ve microwaved for a minute, and voilá, Spanish rice.

Serve with hot sauce and plantain chips, or plain corn chips and salsa.

French toast

French toast is so easy to make that probably nobody needs a recipe, but then again, somebody makes French toast for the first time some day, and you won´t want it to catch you at a bad time, like Dustin Hoffmann in Kramer vs Kramer.

My children love this, so I make it for dinner rather than breakfast. It goes just as well with cheese and broccoli as it does with maple syrup and bacon.

Take one egg per person, add the same volume of milk, more or less, beat it well and dunk sliced bread. It has to soak up the liquid but not turn soggy, so it´s best to use old bread, from a good loaf (the guys from the bag above make the best in Aberdeen).

Toast in a pan you´ve brushed with oil or butter and that´s it. Easy.

And, as a little Friday bonus, a link to a beautiful short film by Maira Kalman.Guaranteed to put a smile on your face, and tighten your heart, all at the same time.