Which means that I love Rocky Road.

The problem is that my wife hates marshmallows and my best friend suffers from Coeliac’s. Not a great start for a dish that’s largely marshmallows and biscuits.

Then Graze.com sent me inspiration in the form of a little punnet Hazelnut Espresso – a mix of cappuccino chocolate, mini amaretti biscuits, dates and hazelnuts. Could that make rocky road…? Well, yes.

So, the ingredients…

• 300g Espresso chocolate (Green&Blacks works well)
• 200g Glace Cherries
• 100g flaked almonds (preferably toasted)
• A load of gluten-free Amaretti biscuits broken in to cherry sized chunks.
• 200g chopped dates

And what to do…

• Get a baking tin about 8 inches square and line it with greaseproof
• If you’ve got untoasted almonds, throw them in a dry frying pan and heat them gently for a few minutes, keeping them moving to stop them burning
• Chuck them in a big mixing bowl with everything but the chocolate – mix it all up…
• Melt the chocolate (Steps 1 & 2)
• Pour the chocolate over the mixture and, well, mix it…
• Once everything is coated in chocolate, pour the mixture in to the tin and stick it in the fridge

Is it any good? Well – there’s no photos of it…

(By the way, if you want to try the Hazelnut Espresso box for yourself, here’s a code for a free box…)

Amaretti biscuits - photo by me...

Oh, and amaretti biscuits…

Amaretti biscuits cost so much, they must be a bastard to make, right? Well, I made some and put them on this site, so they can’t be that difficult, right?

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups of ground almonds.
• 1 1/4 cup of icing sugar
• 3 egg whites
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp almond extract

What to do

• Heat the over to 150c
• Discover that your icing sugar is damp and pound it with a pestle and mortar
• Put the almonds and icing sugar in a mixing bowl or food mixer and mix them together
• Add the vanilla and almond extracts
• Mix…
• Slowly add the eggs until you get a dough. You might not need all the egg white, so add it slowly
• Spoon the dough onto a baking sheet and chuck it in the oven for 25-30 minutes

Tada! Try and let them cool before you eat them.

When they come out, they’ll be soft in the middle with a crisp outer. If you forget to put them in an airtight container, they’ll become firmer and crisper over the next few days.

Tasty, healthy (ish) and gluten free….

This recipe is so depressingly simple, that I actually feel guilty about posting it here. You’ll need:

• Some bananas, cut into chunks
• 1 cup of sifted plain flour
• 1 cup ice cold fizzy water
• 1 medium egg
• A little agarve nectar or light runny honey

Now, are you ready for this horribly complicated one?

• Set the deep fat fryer to 180c / 350f
• Beat the egg
• Add the water to the egg
• Gently add the flour to the eggy water, mixing gently and not caring too much about lumpy bits
• Once the fat is up to temperature, dip the banana bits in the batter and put them in the fryer
• About 2 minutes later, scoop the bits out of the fryer and let them rest on kitchen paper
• Put them in a bowl and drizzle with the agarve nectar
• Eat…

Thankfully, it’s getting cold in the UK right now – which means that it’s time to get out the slow cooker and use my post food satiation to plan and prepare dinners for the next few meals. Once I’ve remembered where I can buy Puy lentils we’ll try some Cassoulade. But first, it’s time for an old favourite – Ragu.

Photo by JoeyWan under Creative Commons

• A big slow cooker – 3.5 litres is about right
• 500g lean beef mince
• 500g pork mince
• 180g chicken livers
• 2 medium onions
• 6 cloves of garlic
• 200g streaky bacon or lardons
• 2×400g chopped tomatoes
• 2×200g tubes of double concentrate tom puree
• 3/4 bottle red wine
• 5 decent stems of basil, finely chopped
• 1/2 a grated nutmeg
• salt & pepper

Put the wine, tomatoes, tomato puree, nutmeg and the basil into the slow cooker. Switch it to auto and let it start warming.

Finely chop the onion and garlic and let it fry in a pan with good 3 or 4 table spoons of oil. Stir it to stop it sticking.

After 10 minutes (assuming nothing is burning) add the lardons. Cook until the lardons start looking cooked. Pour the lot into the pot.

Add oil and fry off the beef. Break the beef up and it fries so that you have small bits of texture, not a solid mass and not pureed mush. When it’s cooked, add it to the pot.

Add more oil, and do the same with the pork. When it’s cooked, throw it in.

Trim anything nasty off the chicken livers and try them slowly in a little more oil. When they’re mostly cooked, hook them out and chop them finely. If they’re still looking pink, throw them back in the pan for a couple of minutes, then add them to the pot. (Trust me, this is a lot cleaner than chopping them before you fry them. I learnt this the hard way.)

Add salt and pepper to the pot and give everything a good stir. If it’s looking a bit too dry, add a little more wine.

Leave the slow cooker on ‘Low’ overnight. Check that nothing is burning, add more liquid if needed to stop anything drying out too badly. Either turn off and leave to cool during the day or leave it on low until you get home.

In my opinion this is best served with rough-die pasta tubes or twists since they pick the sauce up better than spaghetti does. Serve with a bit more chopped basil and a handful of grated Italian cheese.

But first, a word of warning. This isn’t a sandwich you can knock up at 12.15 to eat at 12.20. It’ll take you half an hour to prepare and then you’ve got to leave it until the following lunchtime. It’ll also take a nice big bite out of your food budget for the week.

On the flip side, there’s no way you’ll eat it on your own in one sitting. Even for me, a world famous fat bastard, there are several sittings here – probably with an accomplice.

Shooter's Sandiwich, by Matt Perdeaux, under Creative Commons

• A loaf of bread. A round loaf works well, probably about 10″ in diameter. Tiger bread and cheesey topped loaves work surpringly well. As does sourdough.
• 2 good sized rib-eye steaks. You could go for cheaper ones, but I think that rib-eye really is worth it.
• A handfull of mushrooms
• An onion or half a dozen shallots
• Some garlic – I love cold smoked garlic but you need to double the amount you use
• Some good horseradish sauce and some good Dijon or English mustard
• Greaseproof paper and some foil
• Some good heavy weights or (if you’re a woodworking nerd like me) two chopping boards and some G-clamps

The first thing you need to do is chop the top off the loaf of bread, kind of like a monk’s tonsure. Keep the lid, but scoop out about 90% of the bread, leaving the crust with some bread attached. Yeah, this sandwich is going to be all crust.

Now, rub your steaks with the garlic. I’m not convinced it does much, but everyone seems to do it. Either I’m a heathen who can’t detect the difference or it’s just a habit.

Finely chop the mushrooms, onions/shallots & the garlic and fry them in some olive oil. Once they’re cooked to your liking, hook them out and put them in a bowl.

Now, cook the steaks. Some blogs will tell you to make them medium rare. Recently I read that rib eye is best served cooked medium well done. Personally, I leave them to just on the rare side of blue. But then I’d happily eat raw meat if I knew it was good enough quality.

Take the first steak and spread some horseradish over it, then put it in the bottom of your loaf. Ideally, you want it to fill the bottom, so feel free to poke it, squish it or hit it with a hammer. Now, pour the veggie mix over the top. Then, on goes the second steak together with some of the mustard. Feel free to use lots of Dijon, but only use a little English mustard unless you know your tastes. Americans – please keep in mind that English mustard and American ‘Yellow’ mustard are very, very different things.

Once it’s all in, put the lid back on and wrap the thing is greaseproof paper and then kitchen foil. Now you’re going to need to leave it somewhere cool with either a big heavy weight on it or with those chopping boards and g-clamps round it.

Ideally you want to make this 24 hours before you eat it. I don’t think I’ve ever lasted 8 hours.

Unwrap the thing and take slices out of it like it’s a pie or quiche. Fantastic with salad and piccalilli.

Yeah, I know it’s only May, but I’m already one BBQ into the summer which means we need simple quick food to serve up at the same time as all that glorious charred flesh.

Couscous is the obvious, simple, and surprisingly appealing answer…

• 225g/8oz couscous
• Vegetable stock
• 1 good sized bunch of parsley
• 1 good sized bunch of coriander
• 1 red onion
• 1 unwaxed lemon
• ½ cucumber, de-seeded
• 30g/1oz toasted sunflower seeds
• 30g/1oz toasted sesame seeds
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• salt and freshly ground black pepper

I know how complicated these recipes get, so try to keep up…

Cover the couscous with twice the volume of stock made with boiling water. Leave it for as long as you want, but leave at least 10 minutes so that it has time to soak.

Juice and zest the lemon. Add.

Chop everything else finely. Add.

Store it in the fridge, but take it out at least half an hour before you eat…

In fact, lambs liver is one of my favourite bits of meat (after the duck breast, lamb chop and beef ribeye) and is probably the one most frequently hated due to really awful school dinners.

Liver, by avlxyz, under Creative Commons

Lambs liver cooked properly is moist, tender, and flavourful. Add bacon and a few spices and it’s just fantastic…

This should serve 4 people, although we tend to cut down the veggies a little and have it for 2 with a little leftovers.

• half a packet of streaky bacon
• 600g lambs’ liver
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1tsp garlic salt
• 1tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 1tsp freshly ground nutmeg
• Some oil to fry in…

And for the gravy

• Some butter
• 3/4 cup apple juice
• 2tsp Worcestershire sauce

Mix together all of the dry ingredients in a bowl. We’ll use this to flour the liver before it’s cooked.

Cut the bacon into thirds and then fry them in a little oil until they start to go crisp. Take them off the heat, but put them somewhere to keep warm.

Slice the liver, on the diagonal, into slices 5-15mm thick. The thicker you cut it, the longer it will take to cook, but the thinner you make it, the more batches you will need to cook. Since I like rare meat, I tend to go for something over 10mm.

Now, the next bit needs to be done fairly quickly because of the speed the liver cooks. Take pieces of liver and coat them in the flour. Put each piece of liver into the hot, oily frying pan, and cook it for between 30 and 60 seconds. As soon as it is looking cooked, turn it and do the other side for a similar time. When you can prod it without red juices seeping out, whip it out and put it with the bacon. You can cook quite a few pieces at once but don’t try and cook the whole lot at once.

Once all of the liver is cooked, add a couple of tablespoons of the coating flour to the pan with some butter, and add the juice and Worcester. scrape the pan a little to pick up some of the burnt on juices and you should end up with a rich sauce the colour of a pepper sauce you’d have with steak.

Server it up with the vegetables you already had waiting…

On the flip side, the holiday was in New Zealand and we came back with ideas and recipes…

Sit tight… we’ll be back.

And therein lies the problem. By choice, I eat lots of meat with gentle fat marbling; roasts with crackling; duck with – well duck with anything actually. And I don’t eat enough vegetables unless they are mashed or served with butter. So my Jeckyl and Hyde doctor has told me I need to lay off the saturated fats and start doing some exercise.

I did the only logical thing I could think of. I made cookies.

I’m not going to tell you how to make cookies if for no other reason than that I’m English and all the best cookies are American. What I’m going to do instead is tell you of a little discovery I made.

The brand “Betty Crocker” sell a chocolate chip cookie recipe which boasts “Just add water”.

Here’s a little tip for you… Ignore Betty. Her cookies don’t need any water. Not one drop. Instead of adding 2 tablespoons of water, add the zest of a large orange and two tablespoons of Amaretto instead. I then served it with a pint glass containing 2 shots of chocolate cream liquer, 2 shots of creme d’menthe and half a pint of skimmed milk.

Yeah… The diet starts tomorrow…

Butternut Squash Soup, by mhaithaca, under Creative Commons

Weekends follow a depressingly boring rhythm at the moment… Wake up late; have breakfast at a supermarket cafe on the way to the old house (long story); get there some time after lunch; work until six; and then eat a kebab on the way home.

So, I hatched a plan. Get down there early and use the wonderful kitchen to make a healthy lunch. Butternut squash was obviously the answer…

• 2 bulbs of garlic
• Olive oil
• 4 lbs of Butternut Squash
• 1 yellow onion
• 2 mid-sized Sweet Potatoes
• Sea salt
• Fresh Pepper
• 800ml of Chicken Stock
• 200ml of Single Cream
• 100g of grated Parmesan

Turn the oven to 200c.

Slice the squash length-wise into quarters or eighths, and scoop out the seeds. Peel the sweet potatoes and slice into wedges. Put them in a roasting pan with a drizzle of oil. You know what, I have no idea what quantity of oil a drizzle is either, but since I have no idea how much oil I poured on, it’s about even.

Peel, top and tail the onion. Peel the loose white layers off the garlic, and put the top off so the flesh is just visible. Put them all in a bundle of foil with a drop more oil. Put it on the roasting pan.

Put the whole lot into the oven for an hour.

When it comes out, you will need to blend it into soup. The onion goes in whole. The sweet potato goes in whole. The squash needs to have the flesh scooped out of the skins. Finally the garlic needs to be squeezed out of the paper. That’s all pretty dry, so blend it with the chicken stock, cream and cheese.

By the time you’ve done all that, it’s probably cooled down quite a bit, so stick it on the hob to warm up. Oh, and serve it with crusty bread…

Makes about 8-10 bowls…