The Kitchen Diaries II. Nigel Slater

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      dried apricots: 160g

      self-raising flour: 225g

      chopped mixed candied peel: a tablespoon

      the grated zest of an orange

      rolled oats: 3 tablespoons

      a little demerara sugar

      Set the oven at 180°C/Gas 4. Put the butter into a food mixer with the sugar and beat together until light and fluffy. The mixture should be pale, almost the colour of double cream. Break the eggs and beat them lightly, just to break them up, then beat them into the butter and sugar mixture a little at a time. Chop the apricots in a food processor till they resemble fine orange grit.

      Add the flour to the cake mixture, through a sieve if you wish, stirring gently with a large metal spoon until no flour is visible. Stir in the chopped apricots, peel and orange zest.

      Divide between the paper muffin cases, scatter with the oats and a good pinch of demerara sugar and bake in the preheated oven for twenty to thirty minutes, until risen (they may sink slightly in the centre) and golden brown.

      Makes about 16

      FEBRUARY 19

      The beauty of kale

      When it is touched with frost, it is hard to picture a leaf so beautiful as kale, even more than a nasturtium with morning dew caught in its veins. But there is more to it than that. The frost will sweeten the strident notes of the brassica, just as it does with sprouts and parsnips.

      Cabbage and pork is an age-old marriage that I am still finding new versions of. Brussels sprouts, fried and tossed with bacon and cream, was a recent one; white cabbage with crumbled black pudding; a salad of sprouted broccoli and shredded coppa. All variations on a theme that works brilliantly. Chorizo has a spiciness that goes nicely with kale but, more importantly, it has great pearls of fat that will work the same magic with the dark, bitter leaves as sausages do for sauerkraut and streaky bacon does for Brussels sprouts.

      Kale with chorizo and almonds

      Good-quality cooking chorizo is not the cheapest of meats but I find a little goes a long way. When this recipe was first published in my column I was asked why I suggested discarding the oil, especially as it contains so much chorizo flavour. A good point, but I felt there was enough fat in the dish already. So the suggestion is just that. Leave the spicy, orange, liquid fat in, if you wish.

      curly kale: 250g

      soft cooking chorizo: 250g

      skinned whole almonds: 50g

      a little groundnut or sunflower oil

      a clove of garlic, peeled and crushed

      Wash the kale thoroughly – the leaves can hold grit in their curls. Put several of the leaves on top of one another and shred them coarsely, discarding the really thick ends of the stalks as you go.

      Cut the chorizo into thick slices. Warm a non-stick frying pan over a moderate heat, add the slices of chorizo and fry until golden. Lift them out with a draining spoon on to a dish lined with kitchen paper. Discard most of the oil that has come out of the chorizo (better still, keep it for frying potatoes) and wipe the pan clean. Add the almonds and cook for two or three minutes, till pale gold, then lift out and add to the chorizo.

      Warm a little oil in the pan, add the crushed garlic and shredded greens and cook for a couple of minutes, turning the greens over as they cook, till glossy and starting to darken in colour. Return the chorizo and almonds to the pan, add a little salt and continue cooking till all is sizzling, then tip on to hot plates.

      Enough for 2 as a light main course, 4 as a side dish

      FEBRUARY 20

      The pancetta question

      Modern cookbooks, mine included, are awash with pancetta – to start a sauce, flavour a soup, add protein to a leaf salad or simply give depth and savour. But could we not use bacon?

      Though both bring a similar note to a recipe, pancetta has a few advantages over bacon. Most bacon in the UK is sold in rashers, while pancetta is more often found in useful cubes (often labelled as cubetti), which give more body to a sauce than strips of wafer-thin bacon. Most cures are less salty than our own back or streaky, and seem to have a faintly herbal note to them. (In practice they don’t, but most pancetta is more subtly aromatic.)

      It is this subtlety that makes pancetta more suitable for so many recipes. It tends to become part of the backbone of a dish, rather than intrude as bacon can occasionally do. But that is not all. The reason it is so often specified over bacon is that it is a more consistent product. Suggest chopped bacon for a recipe and you can get any one of a hundred different cures, ranging from pale and watery to deeply smoky and dry. Although there are most certainly differing qualities of pancetta available, it is by and large consistent and therefore a safer bet.

      A block of pancetta bought from an Italian deli will keep in decent condition in the fridge for a week. Bacon rashers less so. I regard a lump of the stuff, dirty rose pink in colour, thickly ribbed with white fat, as one of the kitchen essentials – like lemons, Parmesan and olive oil. A meal it does not make, but the difference it adds to even a few lettuce leaves or a bowl of soup is extraordinary. Today’s bean and spaghetti soup is a case in point.

      Pancetta and bean soup with spaghetti

      The one good thing about having little in the larder is that it prompts experimentation.

      pancetta in the piece: 175g (you can use pancetta cubetti at a push)

      a little olive oil

      garlic: 2 small cloves

      chopped tomatoes: two 400g cans

      chickpeas or other large, firm pulses: a 400g can, drained

      spaghetti: 250g

      parsley: a small bunch

      extra virgin olive oil

      Chop the pancetta into small pieces, then fry for a minute or two in the olive oil over a moderate heat. Once the pancetta starts to turn golden, peel and crush the garlic and add to the pan, followed by the chopped tomatoes, 400ml water and the drained canned chickpeas or beans. Bring to the boil and season with salt and black pepper. Lower the heat so that the mixture simmers gently, thickening slowly, for about fifteen to twenty minutes.

      Break the spaghetti into short lengths and boil in deep, generously salted water for eight or nine minutes, till tender, then drain. Roughly chop the parsley and stir into the soup together with the spaghetti. I add a trickle of really good olive oil to each bowl at the table.

      Enough for 4

      FEBRUARY 21

      A family cake

      Don’t you just hate lining cake tins? I know you don’t have to any more with the ready-made paper liners available from cookware shops, but they have the habit of making everything come out looking like a shop-bought cake.

      The truth is that cakes rarely stick round the sides, and if they do they can be loosened with a palette knife (run the knife smoothly around the edge, pressing firmly against the side of the tin, without digging into the cake). I now line only the base, cutting a simple disc of brown baking parchment or grease-proof paper to fit the base of the tin. It takes thirty seconds, stops the cake attaching itself to the base and leaves your handiwork looking homemade.

      An apricot crumble cake

      This is the grown-up version of the little cakes I made a week or so ago (see here). A family cake, suitable for tea or dessert, in which case it will benefit from