Pumpkin pie often brings to mind a sweet Thanksgiving dessert, best eaten under a generous cloud of cream. Chris Sherville takes it in a different direction with this savoury Greek-inspired version: roasted pumpkin or squash, warming spices, chickpeas, almonds and herbs, all tucked into crisp, golden filo. A little honey and mint finish it beautifully. It’s a lovely way to make the most of a squash harvest, and just as welcome for lunch as it is at supper.
I’ve left out the feta mentioned in your draft because it isn’t in the recipe ingredients.
Some dishes are worth taking your time over. Fabada Asturiana is a rich, slow-cooked bean stew from Asturias, where creamy beans take on the flavour of smoked chorizo, morcilla, panceta and saffron. It’s a hearty dish for a long lunch, and even better made the day before. This recipe comes from Monika Linton’s Brindisa: The True Food of Spain, shared with permission.
Good bread deserves a second outing. This comforting savoury bake layers bread with caramelised onions, herbs and cheese, then lets everything soak up a rich egg and cream mixture before it goes in the oven. It’s a lovely way to use up odds and ends of bread, cheese and herbs, and a handy dish to prepare the night before when you’re feeding a crowd. Serve it warm with a crisp, fresh salad.
When the evenings turn chilly, this creamy smoked salmon linguine makes a lovely supper without the wait for a slow-cooked dish. Chris Sherville’s recipe pairs our new Ben’s Farm Shop smoked salmon with lemon, Parmesan and a little garlic for a fresh, satisfying bowl of comfort. Finish with peppery rocket or parsley, and bring it straight to the table.
Brisket is exactly the sort of cut that rewards patience. Give it Guinness, black treacle and a few hours of gentle cooking, and what starts as a relatively inexpensive piece of beef becomes meltingly tender, dark and ridiculously rich. The Guinness and treacle mellow into a deep, glossy sauce, while the oven does most of the work. Chris Sherville’s recipe is proper autumn and winter comfort food, best served with buttery mashed potato and seasonal greens.
A proper, rustic Italian supper: chicken slowly cooked with a generous sofrito of onion, carrot and celery, then finished with tomatoes, olives, garlic and rosemary. Choose red wine for the Tuscan version, or white wine and mushrooms for the Roman one. Either way, the chicken turns tender and the sauce is made for mopping up with bread.
If you like it spicy and are catering for a crowd, you can end up depleting most of your spice rack. I’ve found that, in terms of bang for your buck, tamarind is a good way of upping the flavour without having to access the pension fund. The downside is that it will make your mulled cider cloudy, so if that’s a problem, leave it out and increase the other spices.
With most local scrumpy coming in at 6.5% ABV or more, steeping the spices in water brings it down to a more manageable 5%.
Other fruits can be used, but the oranges are a must. Cranberries work well, as do diced dessert apples.
Dark spirits such as whisky, Calvados, brandy or rum can be added to taste when serving the cider.
Tapas come in many guises, from simple tortilla to London-centric ‘picture on a plate’ restaurant creations but often in Spain, and also Chez Ben’s, they can just be a ladle of whatever is in the pot at the time. Spain has an abundance of bean stews and Fabada Asturiana is, without question, the best known – almost the paella of the north. It's as simple as they come but totally dependent on the quality of the meat ingredients. It's almost a religion and the packs of, ready to go, belly pork, morcilla and chorizo are available in every food shop (including Ben's Farm Shop). Complete authenticity requires fabes de la granja (large dried runner beans) and a lightly smoked, semi cured morcilla (black pudding), chorizo and thick slices of salted belly pork. In damp Asturia, they smoke all their preserved meats in the chimney. The morcilla is the only one that keeps it’s form when cooked so definitely isn't interchangeable. The real deal beans are expensive and hard to find so most people, including me, substitute fava/butter/judion beans. It's important to stir as gently and little as possible to keep the beans intact.
The end result isn't exactly short of flavour but the extremely inauthentic mojo picon adds a little body to what can be a pretty thin broth. As with all these dishes, a slow cooker is ideal.
First Nation people were baking beans, sweetened with maple syrup, a long time before the Pilgrim Fathers arrived. A rum distilling industry soon developed in New England so the maple syrup was swapped for molasses or black treacle and Boston Baked Beans were born. It’s hard to imagine that tinned baked beans came from anywhere else. They were the first thing I cooked after my mother shipped me off to university with a slow cooker and a copy of Jocasta Innes’s Pauper’s Cookbook and they’ve remained a firm favourite ever since.