How to Eat (26 page)

Turn the heat back to high and to the pan with its meat juices add the red wine or Marsala, let half of it bubble away, and then pour in the stock or water. Let the stock bubble away in the pan until it is greatly reduced, becoming thick and syrupy. Pour these juices over the quail and eat. I like to eat this with my fingers, with bread, salad, tomatoes, scallions, ham or bacon, maybe some beans, elsewhere on the table. This is picnic food. And obviously, you can alter the marinade: try chili pepper, sesame oil, coriander, Thai basil, soy, the usual suspects, deglazing with sake and/or mirin.

Serves 2.

The fact that there might be only two of us eating would never prevent my roasting and eating a chicken (see
page 7
). Cold chicken sandwiches—bread cut thick, chicken, mango chutney, just possibly mayonnaise, and lettuce—are the dinner I dream of, for myself, the next day, or any time. I might want a bag of potato chips with it.

LEFTOVERS

Leftovers come into their own when you’re eating alone; I love a really fruitful mopping-up exercise. The fabulousness of leftovers is their randomness. I’m the sort of person who can’t throw away half a cold cooked potato or a tablespoon of yesterday’s gravy. But, of course, it’s impossible to know what might be lurking in anyone else’s fridge. If you have leftover potatoes, slice and fry them up. Or mash them into a patty with some pan-softened onions, some chopped cooked greens, maybe an egg yolk, then fry and pour the heated, slightly diluted, leftover gravy over them. Or bind the potatoes with the gravy and top with the egg, poached. Or cut a slice of leftover meat into strips and make a salad with warm potatoes, gherkins, chives, lettuce, and chopped hard-boiled egg. Whatever you have, eat it. Somehow, however lovingly I’ve done my shopping, it’s the food I haven’t planned on cooking that I want most to eat.

Other times, when there are two of you, you might want something not exactly fussier but more elegantly composed, dinner rather than supper. Actually, I’d have no compunction about making this chicken with morels just for me; it’s hardly difficult, and I don’t know what there is about it—maybe the creamy old-fashionedness—that makes me sometimes, definitely and distinctly, yearn for it. I have a feeling, which memory doesn’t actually ratify, that my mother or grandmother must have cooked something similar. Anyway, this is what I do.

CHICKEN WITH MORELS

¼ cup dried morels

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

1 teaspoon garlic-infused olive oil (see
page 459
) or ordinary olive oil

4 chicken thighs

1 small onion, minced

1 garlic clove, minced, if not using garlic-infused oil

2 tablespoons Marsala

1/3 chicken bouillon cube

1–2 tablespoons mascarpone

salt and freshly milled black pepper

1–2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Put the morels into a measuring cup and pour over hot (but not boiling) water to reach the 1-cup mark. Leave for at least 30 minutes.

Put the butter and oil into a frying pan that has a lid and in which the 4 chicken thighs will fit snugly enough, and, when hot, put the chicken pieces in, skin side down. Cook for about 10 minutes, maybe slightly less, until the skin has lost its goose-pimply pallor and has become a warm golden brown. Remove to a plate, skin side up.

Into the pan now put the onion and garlic, too, if you haven’t used that incredibly useful standby, the garlic-infused oil, and cook at a low to medium heat until soft.

Drain the morels, reserving the soaking liquid. Strain this brown and aromatic water (I use a tea strainer) into a small saucepan and heat. Inspect the morels (you can do this by feel, using fingers), remove any grit or gravel, and add the morels to the pan with the onion. Put back the chicken pieces, this time skin side up, and add the Marsala. To the mushroom-soaking liquid, add the 1⁄3 bouillon cube and dissolve. Pour this into the pan too and put the lid on. Let it bubble away, but not vociferously so, for 20–25 minutes, by which time the chicken should be cooked through. Remove the chicken thighs to a plate while you reduce the sauce. You needn’t remove the morels (though you can), but do push them to the edges of the pan so they don’t get hit by the full blast of the fire. Using an ordinary tablespoon, ladle out any fat you might see collecting about the edges of this still-fluid sauce; some chicken pieces can give off a lot of watery fat.

Turn the heat up high and let the mushroomy, chickeny, Marsala-deepened sauce thicken; depending on the dimensions of your pan, the material it is made of, and the burner you’re using, this could take 5 minutes or it could take 15. And it depends on how much sauce you want at the end. I stop when the sauce in the pan looks as if it could be generously spooned over and around the chicken pieces without turning it into soup. When the sauce is the right consistency to your mind (and this isn’t a crucial decision: it will taste delicious whatever), add the mascarpone. One heaping tablespoon should be enough, but add more if you want a paler, richer, more buttery sauce. Sometimes I add a glug more Marsala too. Taste and season with the salt and pepper.

Put the chicken pieces back in the pan, spooning the oaky-brown sauce over them. Sprinkle with the freshly chopped parsley and serve—with plain boiled or steamed waxy potatoes or a floury mound of absorbent mashed potatoes, or just plain boiled rice—and eat a pale, crisp, and astringent green salad after.

Serves 2.

STEAK BÉARNAISE

The essence of cooking for two exists in just one word: steak. I’m not saying I wouldn’t cook it just for me, but there’s something solid, old-fashioned, and comforting about the two of you sitting down and eating steak. Too often, when I’m at home alone, I waft along, as you do, in a tangle of noodles, lemongrass, and suchlike. Steak béarnaise is my dream. Fry a steak as a steak is meant to be fried, in a hot pan and for a short time. Turn to page 16 for a recipe for béarnaise. I don’t do frites. Green salad made bloody with the steak’s juices and some real baguette more than make up, in my book, for my french-fry deficiency. Just as I think that roast chicken is so good that I need a lot of persuading to cook a chicken any other way, so I feel about steak that it is perfect simply grilled or fried. But steak au poivre, aux poivres, peppered steak, whichever handle you like to put on it, is, in shorn form, a forceful contender. For me, it’s better without the addition of cream; I like my steak butch, brown and meaty. This is hardly the orthodox approach, and I can see that you might feel a culinary classic ought to be respected. Sometimes I’d even agree. Just go cautiously. You don’t want to feel you’re having dessert at the same time.

I use either black peppercorns, half black, half white or, more often, a many-berried pepper mixture; some of the mixture isn’t strictly speaking pepper at all, but I like its warm aromatic quality, rather mellower than the heat of pepper alone. I have been meaning for years now to buy a coffee grinder especially for spices, but still haven’t managed to do so, and use a pestle and mortar.

STEAK AU POIVRE

2 boneless strip steaks (12–14 ounces each), about 1½ inches thick

scant tablespoon olive oil

3 tablespoons peppercorns, coarsely ground (see above)

3 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more if desired

3 tablespoons brandy

salt, if needed

Using a pastry brush, if you’ve got one, paint the steaks on both sides with oil; you should need not more than a teaspoon on each side. Then dredge the oily steaks in the ground peppercorns—you want a good, crusty coat. If the peppercorns are too coarse, they’ll just fall off; if they’re too fine, you won’t stop coughing when you eat them.

In a heavy-bottomed frying pan, put the remaining oil to heat up. Add the steaks and sear over high heat on each side; then, over moderate heat, add the butter and another drop of olive oil and cook the steaks for about another 3 minutes a side or to requisite bloodiness. Remove to warmed plates. Turn the heat up to high again, then pour in the brandy, stirring well all the time to deglaze the pan. When you’ve got a thick syrupy glaze, taste it; you may want to add salt, and you may want to whisk in a little butter just to help it all taste and look smooth and amalgamated. This, too, is where you could add your dollop of cream if you wanted. I’ve also, instead of the brandy, used Marsala, without which I’m pathologically incapable of existing, and it was dee-licious.

Serves 2.

Real carpaccio, as invented by Harry’s Bar and served up in modish joints all over the northern and southern hemispheres, really is restaurant food—though for mechanical rather than culinary reasons. If you’ve got a slicer or can otherwise be sure of producing the correct, tissue-paper-thin slices, by all means try it. Otherwise, do what any sensible, greedy person would do and work along the lines of the recipe in Richard Whittington and chef Alastair Little’s seminal cookbook,
Keep It Simple.
This is my adaptation; some quantities are changed, ingredients modified. I don’t use the truffle oil the authors specify because the first time I did this, I didn’t have any. Now I feel that it might interfere, so I use olive oil to dress the salad and replace their specified balsamic vinegar with lemon juice. And I use less cheese. But that’s what you should do when cooking—you draw on your own tastes and adapt according to your personality. I wouldn’t suggest substituting like for unlike, or not paying respect to the natural lie of a dish, but lemon, vinegar, oil, schmoil—don’t get het up.

HOME CARPACCIO OF BEEF

½ pound beef fillet, cut from the tail end

vegetable oil

4 tablespoons peppercorns, coarsely ground

3 cups trimmed arugula (or other soft leafy salad green)

2–3 tablespoons olive oil

salt

½ lemon

2–3 ounce piece Parmesan

If the meat’s been in the fridge, take it out a good 30 minutes before cooking. Put a griddle or cast-iron frying pan over high heat to get really hot. Brush the fillet all over with a little oil, then dredge to coat with the peppercorns.

Fill a bowl with ice water. Put the fillet to sear in the hot pan, and give it 60 seconds on each side—and that’s all six sides, the ends as well as the top and bottom, so that it’s encased in searedness. Use tongs, ones that won’t pierce the meat, to turn and hold the meat in place as you sear. Plunge the seared meat into the ice water, then take out, pat dry with paper towels, and leave to cool. You can do this in advance and put it in the fridge for a few days.

When you’re ready to eat, take the meat out of the fridge and let it get to room temperature. Strew the arugula on 2 plates. I never wash salad greens if I can get away with not, but arugula can be sandy, so wash it. Dribble the olive oil over the salad, sprinkle some salt and squeeze some lemon juice on, and, using your hands, turn to coat well but lightly.

Carve—cutting slightly on the diagonal—the fillet into thinnish but not waferlike slices, but you can go chunkier if you want, and divide between the plates. Using a vegetable peeler, shave the cheese into thin curls and let them fall over the top of the steak and salad. I rather like this with some steamed waxy potatoes that, when cooked, are peeled and sliced into thick coins and laid, warm, on the plate with the salad, under the cold dull-ruby slices of fillet.

Serves 2.

Man cannot live on steak alone. Anyone who really likes eating likes stew. This one, which comes via English food journalist Nigel Slater’s
Real Cooking,
is as wonderful as you’d expect anything of his to be. I love his writing and his food, both of which inspire and comfort—and at the same time, which is more than most of us deserve. This particular recipe has another virtue—it’s the perfect amount for two slathering, stew-deprived people or even one, as I can testify.

LAMB AND BEAN BRAISE

Apart from some initial rough chopping, this is an almost hands-free exercise—low effort, high yield. You do need to soak the beans and steep the lamb, but if you do them before you leave for work in the morning, you’ll be ready to go when you get back in the evening. I suppose you could always use canned beans, but I can’t honestly say that turning on the tap, and later the stove, are either of them fearsome strains.

1½ cups dried cannellini beans

2 shoulder lamb chops, each about
2½ inches thick

1 medium onion, cut into wedges

2 bay leaves

few thyme springs

2 celery stalks, sliced

2 medium carrots, peeled and sliced

3 garlic cloves, squashed with the flat
of a knife

5 peppercorns

1 large dried chili, or 2 small

1 orange

1 bottle red wine

3 tablespoons olive oil