Three continents in a pan: stir-fried spinach with chorizo and onions

Considering what I stash in my cupboards, it's no wonder most of my cooking is some kind of fusion. Whether 'improving' French stews with Thai fish sauce or spiking hommous with dried lime powder, the Post-Modern culinary pastiche is the order of the day.

Today's lunch was whipped up at the epistemic crossroads of Thai, Spanish and West African cuisines: the classic Thai phat phak fai daeng was made with Asturian chorizo as well as African spinach, onions and Scottish bonnet peppers, proving a very happy marriage.

1. Slowly saute a lot of crushed garlic with a tad of finely chopped Scottish bonnet pepper.
   
2. Add sliced chorizo and fry on a medium fir until it makes the oil red.
   
3. Add some chopped tomatoes and red African onions, fry until the onions are soft.
   
4. Add a lot of chopped African spinach (it's more robust and sweeter than the regular one) and fold into the mixture. Fry until the spinach retain just a bit of crunch.
   
5. Season with Thai fish sauce.
   
   
6. Serve with steamed rice.

Samphire (also okra, fern and bamboo shoots) kimchi

he only reason why Koreans do not make kimchi out of  samphire is because samphire only grows in North-Western Europe. Should it favour East Asia too, I have no doubt it would have long been part of the gorgeous sanchae or sansai, wild vegetables commonly used to make pickles in Korea and Japan.

Last month I decided to correct this Mother Nature's oversight and made kimchi out of Norfolk samphire. Fresh, crunchy and naturally briny, it is perfectly complemented by ginger and pepper. Just follow your regular kimchi recipe, but use samphire instead of cabbage or daikon. Depending on how much you make, the amount of  ingredients will vary, so I will rather give proportions than exact quantities. You should make enough kimchi base paste to smother the main ingredient comfortably.

 Kimchi base ingredients:

1. equal quantities of minced garlic, fish sauce and minced onion.  
2. double quantities of rice porridge and gochugaru (hot pepper flakes, can be substituted with gochujang)
3. quarter quantity of minced ginger. 

Procedure:

1. Rinse samphire well and remove the woody parts. Cut into equal pieces.
2. Mix the kimchi base ingredients. Fold the samphire into the mixture.
3. Cover with a lid and leave to ferment at a room temperature for 24 hours. When bubbles start showing, the process has kicked off. Move to a cold place, ideally a few degrees above zero degree centigrade. A few days is normally enough to complete fermentation: keep checking until you are satisfied with the taste.

P.S. I also use bamboo shoots, okra, string beans, turnip, daikon (mooli) and fiddlehead fern (warabi or gosari) for my kimchi preserves. Bean sprouts are rather delicate in texture so they can be simply mixed with the excess of juice from already made kimchi and left overnight in the fridge. Kimchi out of bean sprouts and samphire do not hold long, so finish yours within a week or so.

Culinary espionage: Mrs. Mahmoud's secret couscous recipe

here is this Sudanese lady in my apartment block who exudes motherly kindness as she glides around unhurriedly in resplendent multi-layered robes. A year ago I was sitting at my Nigerian neighbour's place having a nice friendly banter, trying, as usual, to outshout a Nigerian music channel on TV and two simultaneous mobile phone conversations, when she popped by with a big bundle in her hands. No, that was not an illegitimate baby, but a large pan wrapped in towels to keep it warm. Inside was the most aromatic and scrumptious couscous that ever hit my nostrils or touched my taste buds.

Let's be honest with ourselves, couscous may be a hip food these days, but most of times it tastes like wet sand and smells like old clothes. Even when cooked at home, following the instructions on the package blindly: "boil water, add couscous, let it sit on the stove for a while", results in lumpy gunk none more illustrious than the anaemic supermarket variety.

That is why Mrs. Mahmoud's couscous was a revelation. I had to know how she managed to turn something so bland and unexciting into a fiesta of taste buds titillation. However, all my subsequent attempts to elicit the recipe from her were to no avail. Not she was unfriendly or secretive. She was too shy.

I had had it before and I still get it all the time. When I ask my African neighbours for recipes the immediate reaction is: 'Why would a White guy ever want to cook African food?' 'Well, because it tastes so blooming good!' Any request to teach me a Yoruba phrase or explain the meaning of different ways of tying female headgear are met with the same kind of disbelief and cultural self-denial. The roots of this deeply seated sense of unworthiness are brilliantly explored in Shohat and Stam's brilliant Unthinking Eurocentrism, but I digress.



In short, I had no other option but to try and crack the recipe myself. After a few progressively successful attempts and a lot of spying on African ladies shopping in Brixton market, I have finally managed to get the taste and flavour exactly like that Mrs. Mahmoud's. So here how it goes.

Mrs. Mahmoud's secret couscous recipe:

1. Peel half a head of garlic and two or three large African onions (or just regular red ones).
   
2. Heat a generous amount of vegetable oil in a thick cast-iron skillet. I use olive oil but sunflower oil with a dab of palm oil, just for the flavour, should be very nice too. The amount should be quite liberal, as couscous absorbs it all without a trace greatly improving in taste and texture.
   
3. Slice the garlic and onions very thinly and gently fry on a very low fire.
   
4. Chop half a Scotch bonnet chili and add to the skillet with half a handful of dried anchovies. Flavour with a nice glug of fish sauce. Remove from fire.
   
5. Bring to a boil 3 glasses of water in a cast-iron pot. Reduce the fire to minimum. Tip the fried mix from the skillet into the pot. Add some salt (I use hand-raked Guerande sea salt, as it contains a lot of sea-water micro-elements on top of the plain old sodium chloride).
   
6. Chop into small bits whatever vegetables you have of the following: runner beans, haricot beans, bell peppers, tomatoes, sweet corn kernels. Add to the pot with a few whole Chantenay carrots and cook until half-done.
   
7. Fold a very generous handful of dried mint and/or oregano into the mix.
   
8. Add 500 g (about one pound) of couscous and fold into the mix. Put the lid on and allow to sit on the smallest possible fire for 20-30 minutes. Stir occasionally.
   
9. Serve with lamb chops and grilled vegetables.

Chicken breast marinade recipe

upreme de poulet is the French for chicken breast. Now how do you make it not only sound but also taste good? I have precious little to no time for such futile activities as baking it with cheese or stuffing it. The best thing you can do to food is to bring out, enhance and underscore its natural flavour.

Here is my own marinade recipe for chicken breast. It makes this rather bland, if healthy, piece of poultry a true trip for your taste buds.

1. Grind the very top of the rind of a lime on a grinder. Make sure you don't get too much of the white layer, just green.
2. Cut the lime in two and squeeze out the juice.
3. Add fish sauce, very finely chopped fresh chilli and a wee dram of brown sugar to lime juice. Mix well. Your choice of chilli will determine the final flavour: Scotch bonnet chilli and Thai prik kee noo chilli, for exampe, give the mixture a very distinct character. You can also use liquid cane sugar or palm sugar.
   
4. Marinate chicken breast cut to the desired size. The bigger the chunks, the longer you need to marinate.
   

Quelle cuisson? Rib-eye steak and diced parsnip salad

his was a bit of a celebratory meal, to mark my latest, very major breakthrough.

The rib-eye steak I brought especially from Amsterdam. I felt very subversive travelling with a planeful of City suits making it for the start of their busy Monday, wearing a sleeveless shirt and carrying a backpack of raw meat: from Moroccan merguez sausages to Dutch runder tartaar extra lean beef mince that I just can't find in London. To bring out the best in the steak, I used a bit of trickery. I marinated it in a mix of:

• freshly ground black pepper,
  
• fish sauce instead of salt,
  
• a wee bit of aceto balsamico bianco (which, thanks to its sugar content, gives that nice golden brown colour tothe steak when you fry it),
• Chinese rice wine (I also had to bring it from Amsterdam because alcohol tax in the UK makes it outrageously expensive for just cooking wine),
• liquid smoke.

Now for frying the steak: you want a really hot skillet, so the meat won't get stewed but seared on the outside while staying pink inside. For that very same reason pat the steak dry with a paper towel before frying. You will also need to use ghee, or pick up the white fluff that comes up when you heat butter - this is to prevent smoking and burning. Ninety seconds on each side and voilà: steak à point!

The salad's pièce de resistance was fried diced parsnips, served with chopped vine tomatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, sliced red onions, lollo rosso, red batavia, apollo, baby leaf spinach, endive, lamb's lettuce and a lot of dill. More than your 5-a-day in just a side dish, how about that! Classic Italian dressing underscored all this natural goodness.

Smokey creamy mussels recipe

fter fixing mussels in accordance with the traditional time-honoured recipes for umpteen times, there necessarily comes a time when you feel like making your own contribution to the world's seafood cooking wisdom. This recipe is my (very liberal) variation on the traditional Breton way of cooking mussels with cidre and bacon (moules à la bretonne).

Mussels cooked this way are apparently so good that last time my ex simply had to have me cook them in the precious few hours that I spent in Amsterdam between my planes - at midnight! I was surely happy to oblige.

Here how it goes:

1. Peel and thinly slice half a head of garlic and two onions (or a big handful of shallots instead of the onions).
2. Melt a generous chunk of butter in a mussels pan (like Nigella says, there's no good kitchen without butter).
3. Fry garlic and onions on medium fire until golden brown.
4. Add 2 kg pre-washed and de-bearded mussels and cook stirringly occasionally until all are open. Removing the released juices a couple of times helps to cook the mussels quickly without overcooking. Keep the juices for later!
   
5. Remove the mussels.
6. Add a glass of single cream, a glass of dry white wine, the mussel juices and some coarsely ground black pepper. Simmer until the smell of alcohol disappears.
   
7. Add a tablespoonful of liquid smoke and the mussels and give it all a nice stir. The advantages of liquid smoke are that it is filtered many times and is supposedly healthier than smoked bacon. This shall make you feel better about all the cream and butter in this recipe!
   
8. Serve with oven-baked frites and white wine. The creamy and smoky broth needs to be served in lions head bowls, it somehow tastes better that way!
   

Puttanesca africana: global fusion cuisine

uite unbeknownst to me, my cooking patterns have evolved to embrace a most spectacular variety of world cuisines - all too oft mixed in a single dish. I realised that when fixing my spaghetti lunch today. As I sautéed garlic and onions in olive oil for puttanesca, I added Thai anchovies and, in lieu of old boring salt, Vietnamese fish sauce - it gives food a more pronounced, deeper flavour. Then I mixed in a pinch of finely chopped Nigerian peppers, which made me think of an Italian puttana feeling sore after a night of heavy African sailor loving: when used in moderation, the peppers leave exactly that pleasantly burning sensation in your bodily orifices as a lot of sexual rubbing does. They also give that drool-invoking savoury flavour so prized in Africa and the Caribbean.

Freshly picked basil leaves and a few shavings of hard cheese felt just right with this intense salty-spicy sauce.

The recipe:

1. Peel and finely chop three red onions and half a head of garlic.
2. Heat a frying pan well, pour a generous glug of olive oil and grind some black pepper into it.
3. When the pepper starts giving out a flavor, add first the garlic and then 10-12 dried Thai anchovies. When both golden brown, add the onions, sauté until all golden brown, then add a pinch of finely chopped Nigerian peppers and fish sauce to taste.
4. Tip a tin of chopped tomatoes and half a cup of red wine and mix well.
5. Allow to simmer on a very low fire for 10-15 minutes.
6. Serve with fresh herbs - parsley, sage, thyme or basil - and a few shavings of mature cheese.