Root Vegetable

Pheasant and celery get on rather well. I sometimes put thick ribs in with the aromatics for a pot-roast bird, and have included shredded celery in a salad of cold pheasant with Little Gem lettuce and walnuts. Celery root seems to be one of the most successful mashes to serve with the mildly gamey flesh of this bird (parsnip is good, too).

Fresh pork hock is not an easy piece of meat to carve. I just do the best I can, cutting the soft meat away in pieces and laying them in a shallow bowl or deep plate. Then ladle the thin, aromatic broth around it.

As much as I appreciate the traditional rendition of the sort of celery root rémoulade you might get in a Parisian brasserie, I also like to shake it up a bit. Including the ham, or even bacon, in the salad rather than serving it alongside gives the meat a while to get to know the other ingredients, becoming more than just an accompaniment. An alternative to bacon would be shreds of smoked venison or prosciutto, or maybe smoked mackerel. Radish sprouts are stunningly colored sprouted seeds with a spicy heat. Enterprising natural food shops and supermarkets have them, or you can sprout your own in a salad sprouter. If they evade you, you could use any sprouted seed here.

Crème fraîche or strained yogurt offers many of the qualities of mayonnaise but with a cleaner, more piquant character. Beating in a small amount of olive or walnut oil will nudge it toward the perfect coating consistency of a classic mayonnaise-type rémoulade dressing. Using these tart alternatives lends a lightness, too.

Many of my most pleasing suppers have been one-off, chucked-together affairs made with whatever was to hand. A question of making do. I rarely write them down, assuming that no one else will be interested in something that simply filled a hole with whatever happened to be around at the time. This was one of those meals, taken as lunch in early March when the cupboard was pretty bare, but I thought I would pass it on for its frugal, done-in-a minute quality and as yet another opportunity to do something with the celery root that turns up in the organic veg box.

Long associated with the finale of the Christmas meal, Stilton and celery is a fine combination and there is every reason to turn it into a soup. I’m not sure it matters which blue cheese you use but the saltier types tend to be more interesting here. A good Stilton will work well enough, but something with more punch—say Picos, Roquefort, Stichelton, or Cashel Blue—would get my vote, as would good old Danish Blue. Cream is usually a given with celery soup, but I am not sure you need it.

If a cauliflower is happiest under a comfort blanket of cream and cheese, we can run with the idea, dropping the cheese and introducing some of the milder, more fragrant spices such as coriander and cardamom into the cream instead. With its toasted cashews and crisp finish of spiced fried onions, this is a mild dish, so I see no reason to soften the blow with steamed rice, preferring instead to eat it with a crunchy salad of Belgian endive and watercress (or some such crisp, hot leaf ), using it to wipe the sauce from my plate.

You could measure my life in health-food shops. It is to them I turn for the bulk of my pantry shopping, from parchment-colored figs and organic almonds to sea salt and cubes of fresh yeast. Their shelves are a constant source of inspiration and reassurance. It is also where I first came across organic vegetables, long before the supermarkets saw them as a moneymaker or the organic-box schemes would turn up at your door. It was these pine-clad shops, with their lingering scent of patchouli, that introduced me to the joys of the organic rutabaga. To this day I wouldn’t go anywhere else for my lentils and beans, though I can live without the crystals and self-help manuals. There is something endlessly reassuring about their rows of cellophane-encased dates and haricot beans, their dried nuggets of cranberry, and jars of organic peanut butter. And where else can you get a incense stick when you need one? Health-food shops rarely used to be without a carrot cake on the salad counter, usually next to the black-currant cheesecake and the deep whole-wheat quiche. Good they were, too, with thick cream cheese icing and shot through with walnuts. I never scorned them the way others did, finding much pleasure in the deep, soggy layers of cake and frosting. This was first published in The Observer five or six years ago, and rarely does a week go by without an email asking for a copy to replace one that has fallen apart or stuck to the bottom of a pan. Few things make a cook happier than someone asking for one of your recipes.

I tend to use this chutney as a relish, stirring it into the accompanying rice of a main course. It is slightly sweet, as you might expect, but tantalizingly hot and sour too. Scoop it up with a pappadam or a doughy, freckled paratha (I have been known to use a pita bread in times of desperation). On Mondays I sometimes put a spoonful on the side of the plate with cold meats. Palm sugar (also known as jaggery) is used in Indian cooking and is available in Indian markets.

Young carrots, no thicker than a finger and often not much longer, appear in the shops in late spring, their bushy leaves intact. Often, they have a just-picked air about them, their tiny side roots, as fine as hair, still fresh and crisp. At this stage they lack the fiber needed to grate well, and boiling does them few favors. They roast sweetly, especially when tucked under the roast. The savory meat juices form a glossy coat that turns the carrot into a delectable little morsel. I have used a leg of lamb here but in fact any cut would work—a shoulder or loin, for instance. The spice rub also works for chicken.

Vegetable fritters, given a savory edge with a flavorsome farmhouse cheese, are just the job for a quick lunch. Cheap eating, too. Grate the carrots as finely or as coarsely as you like, but you can expect them to be more fragile in the pan when finely grated. A watercress salad, washed, dried, and dressed with olive oil and lemon juice, would be refreshing and appropriate in every possible way.

Perhaps it was the carrot loaf of the 1970s, slimmers’ soups, or the post–Second World War carrot cake recipes without the promise of walnuts and cream cheese frosting, but carrots rarely offer us a taste of luxury. Fiddling around—there is no other word—with grated carrots one day, I wondered if there would be any mileage in a dish similar to creamed corn, where the sweet vegetables are stewed with cream to give a deliciously sloppy side dish. There wasn’t. Until I worked backward and added spices to the carrots before enriching them with both cream (for richness) and strained yogurt (for freshness). The result is one of those suave, mildly spiced side dishes that can be used alongside almost anything. In our house it has nestled up to brown rice, grilled lamb steaks, and, most successful of all, sautéed rabbit.

Carrots have been one of my quiet successes. The carrot thinning salad has become a regular weekly addition throughout the summer. Root vegetables no bigger than your little finger have a charm to them that insists you leave them whole. Cooking them, in shallow water so that they steam rather than boil, takes barely a minute or two. I dress them as soon as they are out of the pan, sometimes with a light, lemony dressing, other times with cilantro. To turn this into a main-course salad, add spoonfuls of ricotta or cottage cheese to which you have added pepper and some of the dressing.

As cuts of meat go, the turkey breast steak is a relatively new one and will please those who like their protein neat, mild, and fat free. This addition to the meat counter has its advantages for a quick supper. It can be sizzled in butter with a few aromatics (bay, black pepper, thyme sprigs, and a curl of orange rind tend to cheer it up). Turkey still reeks of Christmas, but the white meat less so than the legs, which always smell like a roasting Christmas lunch. Red cabbage makes a satisfactory accompaniment. Go further, with a few prunes and a bottle of Marsala, and you have something approaching a joyful Sunday lunch, though without a bone to pick.

The frugality implied in the words “cabbage soup” appeals to me just as much as the fanciful descriptions of Michelin-starred menus. The words evoke a rich simplicity where nothing unnecessary intrudes. This is indeed a soup of extraordinary solace, gratifying in its purity. The stark fact that this was a meal formed in poverty is there for all to see. Portugal has a cabbage soup, perhaps the best known of all, caldo verde. It is made with couve gallego, a yellow-flowered kale, whose leaves are flatter and less plumelike than the kale we generally buy in the market. The other ingredients are from the pantry, but should include a few slices of chorizo if the soup is to have any authenticity. This soup works with any coarse-textured greens and eminently, I think, with Savoy cabbage.

The sour crispness of red cabbage makes it a good ingredient for a relish. Something stirring—hot, sharp, sour, bright—to introduce to a gamey pâté or a wedge of pork pie with softly collapsing pastry. Not normally given to making pickles and chutneys, I find this startling relish manageable without feeling I am going too far down the preserving route.

A good use for the older, tougher specimens. I have made this with those plastic-entombed bunches from the late-night corner market and you would never have known it.

I have lost count of the number of appreciative emails and blog mentions about the brownies and the chocolate almond cake in The Kitchen Diaries. They are received gratefully. It is true that I am rarely happier than when making chocolate cake. I especially like baking those that manage to be cakelike on the outside and almost molten within. Keeping a cake’s heart on the verge of oozing is down partly to timing and partly to the ingredients—ground almonds and very good-quality chocolate will help enormously. But there are other ways to moisten a cake, such as introducing grated carrots or, in this case, crushed beets. The beets are subtle here, some might say elusive, but using them is a lot cheaper than ground almonds, and they blend perfectly with dark chocolate. This is a seductive cake, deeply moist and tempting. The serving suggestion of crème fraîche is not just a nod to the sour cream so close to beets’ Eastern European heart, it is an important part of the cake.