Cooking pizza for my sister and her girls on Monday. This recipe — another one from Jennifer Klinec — might be a foodie leap too far, but I think it looks fab.

Pizza with Radicchio, Escarole and Bagna Cauda
Makes enough for 1 large pizza

Ingredients
1 recipe pizza dough (use half the dough)
65 mls olive oil
6 leaves of radicchio, roughly torn
6 leaves of escarole or Italian endive or rocket, roughly torn
1 ball of buffalo mozzarella or a small chunk of ricotta stagionata, shaved or broken into small pieces
1 large egg, the best quality that you can find
6 slices of guanciale (cured pork jowl) or pancetta, torn into pieces

Bagna Cauda
12 anchovies
6 cloves of garlic
freshly ground black pepper
250 mls olive oil
a few drops of lemon juice
1 tsp lemon zest

Instructions
Preheat the oven temperature to 250 C and place a large baking tray in the oven to heat up.

Meanwhile make the bagna cauda by placing the anchovies and garlic in a mortar and pestle with a little pepper. Pound until roughly mashed and stir in the olive oil, lemon juice and zest.

Roll the dough out into a large rectangle and place on a sheet of parchment paper. Dip a pastry brush into the bagna cauda to moisten it with olive oil and brush the dough all over with oil. Scatter generously with the radicchio and escarole leaves (these will wilt down significantly during baking so it’s best to overdo it a little) and spoon generous dollops of the bagna cauda across the pizza. Scatter with the mozzarella or ricotta shavings.

Slide the preheated baking tray under your parchment and transfer the pizza, parchment and all into the oven. Bake for 7 minutes or until the crust looks lightly golden and puffed and the leaves are wilted. Crack the egg in the centre of the pizza being careful not to break the yolk.

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Pizza Dough
Makes enough for 2 large pizzas

Ingredients

325 mls warm water
½ tsp dry yeast or 1 tsp fresh yeast
450 grams flour
½ tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil

Instructions

To make the dough, mix the water and yeast together until dissolved and let stand for 5 minutes.

Place the water and dissolved yeast in a large mixing bowl and gradually mix in half the flour to form a loose, sponge-like dough. Cover with a damp tea towel and place in a warm spot to rise for an hour.

Add the sea salt and oil to the dough and using a wooden spoon, mix in approximately a half a cup of flour at a time until the dough is too dense to stir with the spoon. Remove to a work surface and knead, incorporating the remaining flour until the dough is smooth and manageable.

Place in a lightly oiled bowl, cover again with a damp tea towel and place in a warm spot to rise for another hour.

Roll out and use as required.

ETA this dough is ridiculously sticky and needs to be heavily floured. But if you cook it as rolls, it's a very good ciabatta!

Posting this mainly as a reminder to me, but if anyone else tries cooking it, tell me how it goes!

This comes from Jennifer Klinec, via Londonist. Jennifer runs cookery classes called EatDrinkTalk, and I'm planning on going to one at some point.

Calçots with Romesco Sauce

Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients
24 leeks or calçots, washed, dried and trimmed
sea salt
freshly ground black pepper
10 tbsp olive oil

Romesco Sauce
3 dried Ñora peppers
100 grams Marcona almonds
3 plum tomatoes
1 thick slice chewy, peasant-style crusty bread, either left to go stale or dried in a low oven until hard
3 cloves garlic, peeled
1 tbsp smoked paprika
4 tbsp red-wine vinegar
juice of 1/2 lemon
65 mls olive oil
Sea salt

Instructions
Preheat your oven to 200C. Place the leeks or calçots in a heavy roasting dish and scatter with the salt and pepper. Drizzle over the olive oil and toss well with your hands until the leeks are lightly coated in the oil. Place the leeks in the oven and roast for 20-30 minutes or until tender and charred all over. Remove and allow to cool slightly.

Meanwhile make the romesco sauce by placing the dried chilies in a bowl and cover with boiling water. Leave for 25 minutes to soften, then drain. Toast the almonds in a dry frying pan on medium heat until golden and toasted smelling.

Blanch and peel the plum tomatoes by making an 'x' in the bottom of each tomato. Place in a bowl and pour boiling water over the tomatoes to cover. Leave for 3-4 minutes, then plunge the tomatoes in cold water. Leave for another minute or so and then peel off the skins.
Place the almonds in a mortar and pestle and pound until coarsely ground. Add the garlic, drained Ñora peppers and bread in batches, continue to pound until you have a thick paste.

Scrape the paste into a bowl and add the peeled tomatoes by crushing them lightly into the mixture between your fingers. Stir in the smoked paprika, vinegar, lemon juice and olive oil and season to taste with salt and set aside.

To eat, peel away the charred outer leaves of the leeks and dip the soft inner hearts into the romesco sauce with your fingers.

A couple of weeks back, The Guardian did a series of celebrity recipe swaps — they show us theirs, we show them ours, that sort of thing. The first in the series was Simon Schama, the historian, who it turns out is a serious foodie. His recipe was an oozy mustardy cheese soufflé, which looked fantastic, but as some readers might remember, I have a bit of a history with cheese soufflés. I'm not counting it out, you understand. I just need some more breathing time before I cook another one. A year or so should do it.

The recipe was accompanied by an article about Schama's journey into foodiedom, from his mum's well-meant but somewhat dodgy North London Jewish regular reportoire (I sympathise, Simon. I think my Grandma had the same book), via Elizabeth David and Julia Child into unwise experimentation, and finally the dishes he cooked as his children grew up. It's an utterly lovely article, full of generosity and laughs and, of course, food, and you should all read it. I teared up a bit at the part about meatloaf.

Of the many dishes he mentions, one that caught my eye was Kashmiri raan. It's a lamb dish, and a particularly sumptuous one; it has the look of moghul banquets about it. You start with a joint of lamb on the bone, then you coat it with three separate marinades. The first is a spice rub, scented with garlic, ginger and lemon juice and freshly ground into a thick paste. The second is a puree of almonds, pistachios and yogurt, coloured gold with saffron. The third is a drizzle of honey. You let it marinade for two days in the fridge, then you slow-roast it, covered, until the meat is tender enough to fall away from the bone with the slightest pressure of the knife.

If it sounds like I know a bit about it, that's because I do. Do I look like some low-rent TV chef? I ate it 35 minutes ago.

Well, what's good enough for a moghul banquet is certainly good enough for a weeknight in Wanstead, isn't it? As luck would have it, there was a half-leg of lamb on special offer at Waitrose on Saturday, so I snapped it up.

Schama didn't give a recipe, so I found one online, which comes from the Bombay Palace Cookbook. I didn't change it much — added some black mustard seeds and fennel seed to the spice mix, because I like them. It took about 20min to assemble on Sunday night, then it sat happily in the fridge for the next couple of days. I turned the lamb over each morning and spooned the yogurt mix back over the top. Then, when I got in tonight, I just stuck a double sheet of foil over the top and put it in the oven. 45min on 200°C, then about an hour on 150°C. It smelled fantastic.

The accompaniments deserve a mention, because I made them up myself and I want to blow my own trumpet. I made a pilau rice using a mixture of white and brown basmati and Camargue red rice, with a couple of cloves, some cardamom pods and a bayleaf and the smallest amount of oil I could get away with, using veg stock (out of a bottle) as the liquid, plus some cashew nuts and sultanas.

As a vegetable, I made up a dry cauliflower curry. This really is good, so here's the recipe.

For two:

One small cauliflower, broken into small florets.
Half a teaspoon each black mustard seeds and fennel seeds
One clove garlic, finely sliced
One green chilli, sliced into shreds
A small tomato, or two cherry tomatoes, peeled and chopped (don't de-seed them)
Lemon juice, salt and pepper
Fresh coriander

Heat a little oil in a frying pan with a lid. When it's really hot, add the mustard seeds; they'll spit. After about ten seconds, add the fennel seeds. After another ten seconds, turn the heat right down and add the garlic and chilli; stir-fry until the garlic starts to go translucent. Throw in the cauliflower and stir everything around, then pour in about 1cm depth of water or veg stock. Add salt and pepper, bring it to a simmer and stick the lid on for five minutes. When the time's up, take the lid off and turn the heat up; you need to evaporate almost all the liquid. Stir it every so often so the cauliflower stays covered in the spices. When there's almost no liquid left, add the chopped tomatoes with their juices and the lemon juice, stir well, and keep the heat on until the liquid has gone. Add the chopped coriander, turn the heat off immediately and stick the lid on until ready to serve.

Again, I say, this is really good. Even if you don't like cauliflower, you will like this.

So, the raan. My God, it's incredible stuff. For a start, it tastes of lamb. Not like some lamb curry from a restaurant that only tastes of the sauce; you can taste the meat, and if it's good quality lamb (and this was), it comes through loud and clear. The slow, covered cooking keeps the meat moist and tender, and all the flavour stays in, but it's permeated by an amazing, intense but delicate fragrance from the spices, the nuts and the honey. It doesn't taste hot, but the heat builds as you eat it, just leaving a pleasant warmth. The remaining marinade concentrates down to a richly coloured sauce a bit thicker than double cream; I poured it into a fat separating jug to avoid the small layer of fat that had collected on top. The lamb fat had enriched the sauce and given it a meaty flavour, but the taste of the almonds, pistachios and saffron came through, with a slight sweetness from the honey. The marinades had formed a firm, set layer around the meat — not a crust, more of a very thick paste; I mixed that with my rice.

The rice mixture worked really well, with different textures and a nutty flavour. I think it was better than just a basmati pilau, which works fine with dishes with a lot of sauce, but not so well with mostly dry dishes like this one.

And did I mention that the cauliflower was really, really good?

This is definitely one I'll be cooking again. It's surprisingly little hassle — you just need to make the marinades up, and that's quick work with a pestle and mortar and a blender. It's one of the best things I've ever cooked. Fit for a maharajah. It also looks fantastic; I'll get some photos up tomorrow.

Thanks to you, Mr Schama.

I am thirty-ten... oh, OK, forty. It's a number. I'm surprisingly fine about it. Surprisingly, because I was very much not fine about 39. Strange how these things go.

Anyway. I look good on it.

And what a great way to celebrate a big birthday. The Fat Duck apparently isn't the best restaurant in the world. If that's true, I don't think I'd want to go to the best one, because I think I'd pass out.

( I just saw how much I'd written, and it really needs to go behind a cut. Warning — this is long, and if you read Alasdair's blog a while back, a lot of it might be familiar. But if you want to read well over 5000 words about a visit to the Fat Duck, carry on, carry on... )

If you have a decent fruit-and-veg stall near you, or an adventurous supermarket, you might have noticed some mysterious knobbly things knocking around at the moment, probably lurking vaguely sinister and mostly ignored, somewhere near the parsnips. They're about the size of a small potato, with odd, pink-tinged, scaly skin, and as I said, they're knobbly. Some of them might be cracked. In fact, they look like this:



And they're jerusalem artichokes. And if you haven't eaten them, which is quite likely, you probably give them a nervous glance and walk on by.

But don't! Because, dear reader, they are delicious, low in starch, and make one of the best and easiest soups in the world ever, if you have a blender.

If you look up jerusalem artichoke, the first thing you'll see is that they aren't artichokes. They're a kind of sunflower, and if you try to grow them, apparently you end up with a spiky-leaved triffid about 8ft tall that can withstand a gale-force wind on a cliff edge. But the tubers, weird-looking as they are, taste slightly musky and slightly nutty and fantastic.

There's all sorts of stuff you can do with them. Always peel them first; you can roast them like potatoes, and they go soft and fudgy on the inside and slightly crisp on the outside; you can eat little ones sliced and raw in a salad, where they'll crunch like water chestnuts. Or, as I said, you can make soup.

Here's what you do. For two people, you'll need three or four large-sized lumps of jerusalem artichoke. Try to find the less knobbly ones, as they're easier to peel.

Chop a medium-to-large onion, and chuck it into a large saucepan where you've been heating about a tablespoon of olive oil and a walnut-sized knob of butter. Let the onion cook gently, barely sizzling, and add salt and black pepper and a bayleaf and/or a teaspoon or so of thyme leaves if you have them. While that's going on, peel the artichokes, slice them into evenly-sized chunks, and add them to the pan with about half a litre of chicken or vegetable stock — enough to cover them. Put the lid on the pan and simmer for 20 minutes, then remove the bayleaf and liquidise. The resulting soup will be extraordinarily velvety and aromatic. You can add some cream if you like but you don't need to. If you have some, you can even drizzle in a few drops of truffle oil. But you don't need to.

If it's cold outside, this is one of the best things you can have around. Warm up some crusty bread and dig in.

One warning, though: they make you fart.

Apple and cinnamon ice-cream with wild blackberry ripple is a seriously good idea.

That is all.

Made dinner tonight for sarahx and burge, and they seemed to enjoy it. The main course was chorizo with rioja lentils, and burge said I ought to post the recipe, since I made it up.

So here you go.

This serves three, which seems like a funny number, but you get six sausages in a pack and two each is about right.

So, first you take a wide frying pan, heat up a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, and brown the sausages on all sides. I use chorizo dulce, the uncooked sort; you can also get piccante, but that'll make a very hot dish.

Once the sausages are browned, take them out of the pan and put them to one side, but leave the oil in the pan. It will now be bright red from the paprika in the chorizo and will smell great.

Now dice three medium carrots - quarter them lengthwise and cut the quarters into pieces about 3mm across. Reheat the oil and toss the carrots in, coat them in the oil, turn the heat down and let the pieces colour, tossing them around occasionally.

Chop a medium-sized onion - not too fine, but not chunky - and add that to the pan. Mix it around, keep the heat low and don't touch it for ten minutes. After that, add three finely-sliced cloves of garlic, and when the aroma starts to rise, add a bay leaf, a couple of tablespoons of finely-chopped fresh oregano and about a tablespoon on finely-chopped fresh thyme. Stir everything around and leave it for a couple of minutes, then if you want, add a teaspoon of chilli flakes and two teaspoons of pimenton piccante (Spanish smoked paprika, the hot sort). Add salt (not too much) and a good six or seven grinds of black pepper. Again, stir everything and leave it for a couple of minutes. By now, the mixture will be very dark, but not burned.

Now add the lentils. You want the small green lentils that you don't need to presoak and stay intact while you're cooking. Puy lentils are the most famous type, but you can get Canadian green lentils which are actually the same variety but half the price. You need 180g of these. Drop them into the pan dry, add a teaspoon or so more oil, and give everything a stir so the lentils are coated with the vegetable mixture. Now add the liquid. You want about half a litre of beef stock, and a quarter of a litre or so of rioja. Put the sausages back in the pan, bring the liquid to a simmer, put the lid on and leave it for 20min. Then take the lid off and simmer for a further five minutes. It's best then to leave it to cool, with the lid back on.

Before you want to serve it, bring everything back to a simmer - there should be very little liquid, but still enough to bubble up a bit - and pile a pack of washed baby spinach leaves on top. Put the lid back, and leave for three minutes, which is just enough to wilt the leaves.

To serve, pile the spinach into some bowls. Take the sausages out and put them aside on a warm plate. Stir a good glug of extra-virgin olive oil and a further splash of red wine into the lentils, then spoon them on top of the spinach. Put the sausages on top, then serve. Drink the rest of the rioja.

You can also do this with other types of sausage - a Cumberland ring is particularly good. Stick a couple of skewers into the ring at right-angles to keep it together and brown it on both sides, and cook the lentils with a non-oaky red wine and without the oregano and spices.

It's really good.

Those of you who watched last night's Heston Blumenthal In Search of Perfection, where he made what he reckons is the Perfect Hamburger, might be interested in this, where a Guardian reporter wheedles his technique for making tomato concentrate out of him. Apparently it's full of umami (that's the intense savoury flavour you get in things like Parmesan, mushrooms and, yes, tomatoes) and enhances the flavour of meat. And unlike most Blumenthal recipes, it looks like you could do it fairly easily without a white coat, a pair of safety specs, a flask of liquid nitrogen, a femtosecond laser, and a hunchbacked assistant lurching around and calling you 'Marster'. So I think I might have a go.

I'm a little sceptical about Blumenthal, or more specifically, about his media appearances. He's clearly a miraculous chef and a good bloke; his food is wonderful (I've not eaten at the Fat Duck, but the Hind's Head, which is the non-poncey British Classics pub next door, is fully under his influence) and the spirit of never-ending enquiry about what makes food good, and the sensory experience of eating, is fascinating.
But the thing is, he's a professional chef in a professional (if eccentrically equipped) kitchen, and with a brigade of professional (if equally eccentric) staff to help him. His programmes are presented as cookery programmes, as if people could replicate what he does. Well, you could. If you were willing to spend three days making chicken tikka masalla (as he did last week) or an equal amount of time making hamburgers. And getting hold of sodium citrate to make the fondue topping emulsify properly. And trying to handle the dough for the burger buns. Believe me, any bread dough made that wet, and with flour that strong, is going to be an absolute nightmare — it'll be semi-liquid and so sticky that it'll seem to defy the laws of physics. It'll run up your sleeves, over the floor, and coat the cat. In six months' time, you'll find some on the ceiling. You've seen The Blob? You get the idea.
Yes, you could do it. If you were insane, and bored, and had silly amounts of time on your hands. But it seems that Heston's techniques, away from the restaurant kitchen, are likely to be more interesting to the food industry than to normal cooks, and that worries me. Because the food industry isn't primarily interested in nutrition, it's interested in making cheap stuff taste expensive; and Heston's techniques of brining meat to keep it juicy and using synthetic emulsifiers just give some of their dubious (and unhealthy) techniques an air of respectability.

It's interesting that the BBC's two flagship cooking programmes at the moment are so diametrically opposed. Nigella Lawson's programme is entirely about food as sensuality. There's no measuring, hardly any technique, and very few shots of the actual food — but lots of shots of lovely Nigella and her lovely family and her lovely friends (but never her husband, who isn't very telegenic), eating stuff she's previously been cooing orgasmically over. Which if you've read any of Nigella's books, isn't really what she's about.
And then there's science-lab Heston, the boys' cook, which is all technique and measurement and weird shit, and lots of shots of food and actual cooking, but with almost all the sensuality surgically stripped away. You might get a sequence of messy burger-eating, but if Nigella did that she'd roll her eyes, fellate her fingertips, and make the sort of noise that would get you chucked out of Waitrose. Heston just starts talking about mouthfeel.
The programmes are so distinctly styled that they might as well be coloured pink and blue. Although the food on both looks great, both of them are strangely off-putting. I'd much rather have the Hairy Bikers, or even Jamie Oliver's Channel 4 series, which balance the two sides of food much more evenly.

I made quince and brandy ice-cream yesterday. Italian-style, with no egg yolks. Very smooth, light and clean-tasting, it is, and more than a little Moorish. If I do it again, I'll cut down the brandy and add some rosewater.