Lucknow Spiced Roast Lamb

Another excellent recipe from Rick Stein's India. There's a fair amount of prep work in making and applying the spice paste, but once it's done and the lamb is in the oven, that's it. You can serve with quite plain accompaniments (roast potatoes or boiled rice, and some simple vegetables or salad) because the lamb is so rich and the spice paste so delicious. It's tempting to skip steps like frying the onions but I urge you not to; much of the paste should end up inside the roast, and you want it to percolate into the meat, so it needs to be tasty straight from the blender. With this mix of ingredients, that's easy.

Ingredients

• 2kg easy-carve (boned) leg of lamb
• 2 brown onions, thinly sliced
• 6 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• 6cm ginger, roughly chopped
• 55g cashew nuts
• 75g desiccated coconut
• 300g thick Greek yoghurt
• 3 tbsp red wine vinegar
• 2 tbsp garam masala
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp Kashmiri (mild, bright red) chilli powder

Fry the onions in oil for 10 minutes until deep golden brown; add the garlic and ginger and fry for a further 2-3 minutes. Transfer to a food blender and blend to a paste with all of the other ingredients.

Sit the leg of lamb in a roasting tray and make 1.5cm deep and wide incisions all over, so you can push the spice paste in. If you like, you can take off the thickest part of the fat as well, but leave some on so the roast stays moist. Push the spice paste into the middle where the bone was removed, and into the incisions, and finally coat the surface of the lamb thickly. If you have any left over, plop it underneath the lamb. Add about 200ml of water to the bottom of the tray and cover the whole leg loosely with foil. Roast at 150C for 1.5 hours, then remove the foil and roast for a further 30 minutes uncovered. Allow to rest for 15 minutes before carving thickly.

Microwave Hollandaise Sauce

The asparagus season has started, new potatoes are out, and salmon is fresh and tasty at the supermarket, so what better accompanying sauce than a home-made Hollandaise? I have never made one before but they're notoriously difficult, so I looked for a microwave recipe. This one worked first-try, and I made 2/3rds of the website quantity, which gave generous helpings for two people.

Ingredients

• 125g butter
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 tbsp lemon juice (about half a lemon), well-strained

Method

Put butter in a small pyrex bowl and microwave for 10-30 seconds, until the butter is soft, and no warmer than 45C. In a separate bowl or ramekin, mix the yolks and lemon juice. Add this mixture to the softened butter and combine well. Microwave on high, stopping to whisk every 10 seconds, which will feel very frequent but is necessary. Suddenly the sauce will thicken as the yolks cook: don't overbeat or overcook beyond a good consistency.

Faux Middle Eastern Lamb Tart

OK Uncle Richard, you can look away now! This is a totally inauthentic bit of fusion food that I've taken even more time-saving liberty with than the original. But it was surprisingly tasty, and I think I will make it again.

Ingredients

• 1 red onion
• 500g lean lamb mince
• 1 tbsp tomato paste or three tomatoes
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1.5 tsp ground coriander
• Pinch of dried chilli flakes
• 3 tsp cumin seeds, toasted
• juice of a lemon
• a generous handful of finely chopped mint, plus extra leaves to serve
• 3 sheets frozen puff pastry
• two more tomatoes
• handful of chopped flat-leaf parsley
• hummus made from one tin of chick peas
• 1/2 to 1 pack of feta cheese, to taste

Lay the pastry out to defrost, preheat the oven to 200C, and make the hummus, if you haven't already.

Finely chop the red onion and fry gently for a few minutes, until translucent and soft. Add the lamb mince and fry, breaking it apart, until browned. Crush in the garlic and stir through the paste, or finely chop the tomatoes and stir them in. Add the spices and fry for a few minutes, until fragrant. Turn the heat off and add half of the lemon juice, cumin seeds, and mint. (The mixture will appear undercooked compared to e.g. moussaka; you can cook it for longer, but it will get a blast in the oven later, so don't make it too dry.)

Spread the middle third column of each pastry sheet with hummus, then top with the lamb mixture, and scatter over the crumbled feta. Loosely fold over the outer thirds of the pastry to form a fat edge. You can slightly crimp the tops and bottoms of the sheets if it looks like the juices are going to run out. Bake in the oven for 25 minutes, or until the pastry is risen and golden.

Meanwhile, dice the remaining tomatoes and combine with the parsley and the remaining mint, cumin seeds and lemon juice. When the tart is finished, top with this salad, the reserved mint leaves, and serve.

Daikon and Carrot Pickle / Salad

This crispy sweet-sour Japanese accompaniment is halfway between a pickle and a salad. You can use daikon, in which case I suggest using a mandolin, so that both the carrot and daikon come out in long thin strips; European radishes work fine as well, but in that case I suggest slicing both the carrots and radishes into thin disc-shaped cross-sections, so that the salad is made up of many little circles instead of long strips. The vegetables become softer and more pickled the longer you leave them in the marinade, and it keeps well up to at least 10 days in the fridge (I have always finished it faster than that :)). The finer you slice the vegetables, the faster they will pickle. This works great with rich foods like tempura or in banh mi, as the astringency cuts through the fat.

With cauliflower tempura.

Ingredients

• 250g carrot (about 2 carrots)
• 250g daikon (about 20cm)
• 1 tsp salt
• 3 tbsp caster sugar
• 4.5 tsbp rice wine vinegar
• 1 tbsp sesame seeds

Method

Top, tail and peel the carrot and daikon, then mandolin or julienne. Place the daikon and carrot in a mixing bowl and combine well with the salt, preferably using your hands to get all the pieces covered. Leave for 30-60 minutes. Drain the vegetables into a sieve and gently squeeze out the excess liquid. Wipe out the mixing bowl and return the vegetables.

Mix the sugar and vinegar together in a bowl until the sugar has dissolved (warming gently in the microwave can make this easier). Pour the sweet vinegar over the daikon and carrot, refrigerate, and leave for as long as you can: after a couple of hours the vegetables will be marinaded but still crispy, and as you leave them longer they will soften and the flavours will deepen. Stir every day to ensure the vegetables get an even pickling.

Crystallised Rose Petals

Two of our friends recently celebrated their engagement with a party, and I wanted to bring something as a gift. She is super-crafty and loves baking, and I thought maybe it would be fun to bring crystallised rose petals, perfect for topping cakes. I have a huge range of roses in the garden so I tried a few varieties:

I used this recipe, and even with a hundred rose petals, I didn't get through a cup of sugar and an egg white. I also found it too fiddly to use tweezers and just picked up the petals by hand. I would like to try simply painting them with sugar syrup next time. All of the varieties were tasty, but for some reason the white roses became very fragile and stuck to the tray completely. The red simple roses worked the best, while the magenta and orange roses were somewhere in between. Better than greaseproof paper are silicon baking tray liners: they provided the best non-stick surface. It's also important to wait a good 24 hours before attempting to remove the petals.

Overall they made a lovely combination of colours, and I gave them to my friend in a jar, separated with layers of greaseproof paper:

Also, once you've made them, don't let them get above about 25C. They can collapse and go sticky, as I found a week later when I checked on the jar of offcuts I stored in a top cupboard.

The Best Buttermilk Pancakes

My husband and I recently had a small morning argument about pancakes. After some chivvying, he got up and made pancakes for breakfast (I make nice Saturday morning breakfasts all the time, without chivvying). For reasons only he knows, he eschewed all of the recipes I've already blogged, and found yet another random one on the internet to try. Again forgetting previous advice, he decided not to separate the eggs and whip the whites, used a random mug instead of a proper measuring cup for the flour, tried making his own buttermilk, and overbeat the batter. The result: bouncy tough glue circles; what I imagine dwarves chew for breakfast. Even with as nice toppings as I could find, they were inedible.

I spent half an hour or so Googling until I found someone who'd already been through this loop, and found the perfect husband-proof buttermilk pancake recipe. No egg white separation, but you will still need to remind him to buy buttermilk, and to leave batter barely mixed. I have updated it to metric quantities with Australian ingredients (I think our buttermilk is thicker). We didn't think we would eat all of these, but they were so delicious we polished them off. You'd be healthier splitting these between three people, or four as part of a brunch.

Ingredients

• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 250g plain flour
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 2 eggs, slightly whisked
• 500ml Casa Buttermilk
• 2 tablespoons melted butter

Method

In a medium bowl, stir together the salt, baking powder, baking soda, flour and sugar. In a separate larger bowl, whisk together the eggs and buttermilk. Drizzle in the butter as you continue to whisk.

Switch to a wooden spoon and pour the dry ingredients on top of the wet; stir until almost completely combined. The more you stir pancake batter, the more flat and tough the pancakes will be, so mix only until a few streaks of flour are remaining.

Butter and heat a pancake pan and cook ladlefuls of batter until bubbles begin to form, flip and cook until golden. Serve immediately: I like mine with maple syrup, crème fraiche and strawberries.

Soft Buttery Dinner Rolls

I usually suck at making rolls. I don't know why, but they always come out dry, or rock hard. It's probably because I never used to look up any specific recipes, just took some bread dough and divided it. This time I wanted to make one of those Vietnamese/French fusion sandwiches, like banh mi, but cribbed from Nigel's second Kitchen Diaries. I really wanted a soft, fresh, buttery roll, the kind you get in a five star restaurant and can't help but take two of, even though you know you shouldn't fill up on bread. Fortunately I found an awesome recipe first-try! My main modification was to use the dough setting of the breadmaker, because I have a three-month-old I'm lazy.

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon active-dry yeast
• 1/2 cup (110ml) warm water
• 1/2 cup (110ml) milk (I prefer whole)
• 1 large egg
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 3 cups (400g) plain flour
• 1 tbsp butter
• melted butter for greasing and topping

Method

Put the ingredients in the breadmaker and put on a dough setting. Once it gets to the first rise cycle, switch it off, and leave for about an hour, until doubled in size.

Flour a kitchen counter and turn the dough out; divide in half, in half, and then into thirds, to form 12 little dough balls. Without totally knocking the air out, tuck any rough edges away, and make the balls fairly round-shaped. Line a 9x13" (23x33cm) pan with greaseproof paper, then brush with melted butter. Lay 12 dough balls in a 3x4 grid, evenly spaced. Cover with a warm damp (but not heavy) tea towel and let rise in a warm environment (I use my oven on 40C, no fan), for 30-40 minutes, until pillowy.

Preheat the oven to 190 C and brush the rolls with more melted butter. Bake for 13-18 minutes, until risen and golden. Don't overbake -- you want to catch them while they're still moist and tender.