‘Frazzled’ aubergines? Okay, so I’m definitely not talking about aubergines cooked alongside the popular, bacon rasher-shaped potato snacks.

I sense your relief.

The idea of ‘burnt’ aubergines may be more familiar; popularised recently by chefs like Ottolenghi, it’s actually an age-old cooking technique. I prefer to call them frazzled. It’s just…well, it’s just a lovely word.

Shiny purple fruits are placed over a naked flame, roasted or grilled until skins blacken and they collapse inward on themselves with a steamy sigh. Once cooled and split, the inside is silken, and above all gloriously smoky; a total transformation. It is this creamy flesh that blends into magical dips such as baba ghanoush, but I like to use it as a base for a sauce. It seems very decadent somehow; almost fit for a feast.

The meatballs bobbing within are made with lamb, sweet nubs of date and warming cumin and chilli. I’ve nicked a trick from the Italians too and mixed in some breadcrumbs soaked in milk – just a little – the difference in texture is astounding. They become light and – dangerously – extremely easy to eat. A swirl of yoghurt and a few jewels of pomegranate make this dish really rather pretty. Serve with cous cous or bread to absorb the luxurious sauce.

I came up with this recipe as for the Le Creuset ‘Cast Iron Challenge’, so if you think this sounds a bit tasty, please vote for my recipe on twitter (using ‘I’m voting for @FoodStories in the (@McArthurGlenUK #LeCreuset #CastIronChallenge http://goo.gl/EM7fD‘), and you could win a Le Creuset voucher worth £50!! That’s pretty awesome.

Lamb and Date Meatballs in Frazzled Aubergine Sauce

500g minced lamb
4 dates, pitted and finely chopped
1 heaped teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 heaped teaspoon hot chilli flakes, or to taste
1 teaspoon dried mint
1 thick slice white bread
Milk (about 4 tablespoons)

For the sauce

4 aubergines
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 400g regular tin chopped tomatoes
2 black cardamom
1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses
1 cinnamon stick
300ml vegetable stock

Vegetable oil, for frying

Pierce the aubergines in several places with a fork, then place directly on the gas ring of the hob, turning occasionally, until black and shrivelled all over. Alternatively, grill them to the same effect.

Remove the crusts from the slice of bread and break into rough pieces. Place in a small bowl with enough milk to mash to a paste.

In a small frying pan, toast the cumin and coriander seeds over a low heat, stirring frequently, until they start to smell fragrant. Take care not to burn them. Grind them in a spice grinder or crush them in a pestle and mortar.

In a large bowl combine the minced lamb, ground cumin and coriander, chilli flakes, chopped dates and mint. Season with salt and pepper. Mix well; really , really well. Get in there with your hands and knead the mixture almost like a bread dough. Make sure the dates are well distributed. Roll into walnut sized balls. Set aside on a plate.

Heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil in the Le Creuset, and fry the meatballs in batches, 4 or 5 at a time, until golden brown all over. Set each batch aside while you cook the next.

To make the sauce, scrape the flesh from inside the aubergines, leaving behind the blackened skin. Chop roughly. Fry the onion until , cardamom pods and cinnamon stick until the onions are soft and beginning to colour. Scrape up the lovely meaty residues from the pan as you do this. Add the aubergines and garlic. Turn up the heat a little and Cook for about five minutes more stirring.

Add the tomatoes, pomegranate molasses and stock. Put lid on and cook for 45 mins to an hour on low heat. Taste and season. For a thicker sauce, remove the lid towards the end of cooking time to reduce it.

Scatter with pomegranate seeds and coriander to serve.

Over the years I have become very interested in the food of Iran, then Georgia, and now Afghanistan. The cuisines all make use of ingredients I am very fond of, such as yoghurt, meats like lamb, fruits such as dates and pomegranate, vegetables such as spinach.

A browse around the bookshelves of Iranian shop/deli Persepolis recently turned up Noshe Djan, an Afghan cook book by a woman called Helen Saberi. Helen has written a cook book of the kind I have increasingly come to love; she married an Afghan man and spent a significant amount of time living in Afghanistan absorbing the culture and cooking the food. She has lived the life of an Afghan and she provides a heartwarming introduction to the Afghani meal time; the book is the kind one can read like a novel. It is genuine, accessible and utterly fascinating.

The first recipe I’ve cooked is the amusingly titled ‘sabzi pilau’ or ‘zamarud’, meaning emerald. I say amusing as every recipe like this, which suggests the main ingredient is a vegetable (in this case spinach), then goes on to specify ’700g of lamb’ or, often, chicken.

It was bloody delicious, although it did take a few hours to cook. Worth waiting for, but anyone who is making this might want to consider doing it on a weekend. Or perhaps you’re smart enough to just read the recipe properly in the first place, unlike me. We ate at 12.30 am.

The spice mix makes this interesting – char masala. It is equal parts cinnamon, cloves, cumin and black cardamom. In other spice mixes the stronger flavours like cloves are generally used in smaller quantities, but not here. I also loved the liberal use of black cardamom which I don’t often see; one of my favourite spices, like giant smoky black raisins.

The final pilau was comforting, with the feel of a biryani. I served it with garlic yoghurt (made by blanching some peeled garlic cloves then mixing with lightly whipped, seasoned yoghurt) and an aubergine pickle, which is also worth mentioning.

Small aubergines are slit, and then a whole garlic clove placed in each one; when pinched together they look like mussels. The pickling liquid is simple – white vinegar, sugar and green chillies, nigella seeds and fenugreek, the flavour of the latter being particularly suited to aubergines. It has a sort of intriguing musty flavour which contrasts the acidity. The pickled green chillies are obviously a mega bonus too.

Afghan Zamarud (from Noshe Djan by Helen Saberi)

This recipe serves 4, although if you have other dishes too it could easily serve 6-8. I’d recommend eating it with yoghurt on the side. The lamb can be substituted for a whole chicken, jointed.

450g long grain white rice (basmati preferably)
110ml veg oil
2 medium regular onions, diced
700-900g lamb on the bone, diced (I only used 500g diced lamb shoulder, which was enough. I can imagine goat would also work well)
225ml water
2 teaspoons char masala (to make char masala take equal quantities of cumin seeds, cloves, cinnamon stick and the seeds from inside black cardamom pods and grind them in a spice grinder or pestle and mortar)
450g spinach
110g leeks
2 teaspoons ground coriander (Helen also gives an alternative of dried dill)
1.5 litres water
2 hot green chillies
Salt and pepper

Rinse the rice a few times until the water runs clear and then soak it in fresh water for at least half an hour.

Heat 75ml oil in a pan and fry the onions in it, stirring frequently until soft and golden. Trim excess fat from the lamb pieces, then add it to the pan and continue frying until the meat is well browned. Add the 225ml water, 1 teaspoon of the char masala and salt and lots of black pepper. Bring to the boil, reduce to a simmer and cook until the meat is tender. This takes a couple of hours, FYI, depending obviously on the size of the lamb dice. It’s nice to have big chunks but if you want it to cook faster, cut it smaller.

Prep the spinach by cutting off any large stalks and washing really thoroughly, then chop roughly.

Heat the remaining oil in a large pan and fry the leeks in it, until they are soft and nearly brown. Add the spinach and continue to fry, stirring all the time. When it starts to wilt down and reduce in size, turn the heat down, cover the pan and cook gently until the spinach is completely wilted down and cooked. Add the ground coriander (or dried dill) and some salt and pepper. Cover and cook gently until all the water is evaporated and the spinach soft.

Preheat the oven to 150C/200F/Gas 2

Bring the 1.5 litres of water to the boil and add a teaspoon of salt. Drain the rice from the soaking water and add to the boiling water. Cook for 2-3 minutes, then drain and add to a casserole dish with a tight lid. Add the spinach and meat along with approx 175ml of the juices and the other teaspoon of char masala. Mix this together gently but thoroughly. Put the green chillies on top of the rice. Cover the dish and put it in the oven for about 45 minutes.

After this time, remove the chillies from the top of the rice. Serve the dish on a large platter. As I said, I like it with yoghurt, which I mixed with crushed garlic that had been blanched in boiling water for a few minutes. Garnish the dish with the chillies.

Aubergine Pickle (from Noshe Djan by Helen Saberi)

This works best with baby aubergines. Helen says that if you can’t get them you can use regular aubergines too, diced. In that case just chuck the garlic cloves in to simmer with the diced aubergine.

450g baby aubergines
110g garlic (basically a garlic clove for every baby aubergine)
1 heaped teaspoon turmeric
2-3 oz fresh green chillies (about 8)
1 tablespoon nigella seeds
1 tablespoon fenugreek seeds
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 tablespoon dried mint
1/2 teaspoon sugar
500ml vinegar
150ml boiled water

Slit the baby aubergines lengthways to the stalk, but don’t separate them. Put one peeled garlic clove inside each as per the picture above.

Fill a saucepan with water and bring it to the boil. Add the aubergines. The water should cover them. They will bob up to the top during cooking, when you will need to push them down again. Inevitably some of the garlic cloves will pop out – don’t worry about it, you can fish them out afterwards.

Simmer gently for five minutes then remove the garlic and aubergines with a slotted spoon. Keep the cooking water. Once they are cool enough to handle, put a layer of aubergines and garlic in a large jar, followed by a layer of chillies and repeat until both are all used up.

Mix together the vinegar, sugar, salt, fenugreek, dried mint and nigella seeds plus 150ml of the cooking water. Pour over the aubergines. Seal with a lid.

I ate mine after about 3 days and they were lovely. Helen doesn’t specify how long they should be left before eating.

Tagines have always been something I’ve viewed as having great potential to be really tasty, but I’ve never eaten a good one. What I imagined in my head to be a thick, rich, aromatic stew with complex flavours always arrived as a thin, watery bowlful bearing way too much dried fruit.

Because I am a spoiled and lucky girl, I received a magnificent tagine for chrimbo; a chance to turn things around and make the tadge I’ve always wanted, Pecknam stylee.

The tagine is heated on a little metal thing that looks like a ping pong bat with dimples in it, which helps to distribute the heat evenly across the base. It’s important that the tagine is heated slowly, otherwise it will crack and spoil all your fun before you’ve started.

The base was thickly covered with a bed of onions, the idea being that they would cook down, becoming silken and lush and absorbent of everything above. This being Peckham (bruv), the meat had to be goat, which is very easy to come by here. Its ballsy mutton like flavor is perfect (you could obviously substitute mutton if you can find goat) and it loves long cooking to become properly tender. For veg, some of those little white baby aubergines, which also need a good simmering into submission (they remain stubbornly bitter otherwise) and some small turnips, diced.

For the fruit, which for me is potentially the making but most commonly the breaking of a good tagine, I bought dried fruits from Persepolis, ending up with a kind of Moroccan/Persian hybrid recipe. There are many similarities between the cuisines. In went a dried lime, which the Iranians add mostly to stews where they bob about, gradually releasing a flavor which is like a lime essential oil, emerging at the end shriveled and spent. Apricots went in too, but not those horrible overly sweet and sulphurous supermarket ones but fragrant perfumed Persian fruits. A few scarlet barberries flecked the top, adding sourness, like tart cranberries.

For heat, I couldn’t help whacking a scotch bonnet in. I’m sorry. If I didn’t I’d be betraying Peckham. It was left whole though and just pierced, to contain heat but leach flavour. Having impulse bought a bag of African hot peppers, a couple of those went into a spice paste with loads of garlic, two types of paprika and a shed load of ras el hanout. It could have blown our heads off but didn’t; a bit on the hot side for a tagine, but with an enjoyable slow build.

After three hours of simmering and steaming what emerged was the tadge I’d always wanted; deep and complex, sweet then spicy then sour, lips were sticky from slow cooked onions and goat fat. A scattering of mint and spring onion freshened things up at the end.

This is, as you would imagine, even better the next day and again the day after that. I served it with flat bread and Sally Butcher’s Borani-ye Esfanaj (spinach with yoghurt – from Persia in Peckham), which is one of my favourite yoghurty arrangements of all time.

Peckham Goat Tagine (serves 6)

500g diced goat meat (or mutton)
4 small turnips, peeled and cut to the same size as the aubergines
6 small white aubergines, halved
3 onions, sliced
1 scotch bonnet chilli, left whole but pierced
250ml water
1 dried lime
5 dried apricots
1 scant tablespoon barberries
Mint leaves, finely sliced
1 spring onion, finely sliced

For the paste

5 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon salt
2 African hot pepper dried chillies (optional)
2 tablespoons ras el hanout
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
1 teaspoon smoked paprika (smoky paps)
1 tablespoon water

Ideally I would have marinated the goat overnight in the paste then added it straight to the tagine without browning. I didn’t because I wasn’t organised enough so I’ve set out the method below as I cooked it.

Start by heating the tagine slowly. Add some olive oil, the onions and scotch bonnet chilli. Let the onions cook down gently while you brown the meat.

Cover a plate with flour and season it with salt and pepper. Dust each cube of the goat meat in it. Heat a frying pan and add some oil. Brown the meat on all sides. This will need to be done in several batches. Add this to the tagine, followed by all the other ingredients, including the paste. Season with salt and pepper and cook on a lowish heat for three hours, stirring every now and then after the first hour or so. After two hours, I’d advise you pick out the scotch bonnet chilli, because it’s only a matter of time before it bursts and you get a lot more heat than you bargained for.

Scatter over the mint and spring onion and serve with plenty of flat bread for dipping.

The idea of making ‘ultimate sandwiches’ has been brewing in my head for a while now; hell, I started already by making the meatball sub, the best chicken sandwich of my life and the po’ boy of dreams. Since then I’ve been, well, distracted, but when I was recently sent a sous vide machine to play around with, I knew it was time to get it involved. It had to be a meaty sandwich, it had to be extreme, and it had to be made in the Sous Vide Supreme.

I wanted to start with pork so I went down to the new butcher in Peckham, Flock and Herd, and bought a frankly massive piece of pork belly – 3kg. No idea why. The plan was to vac pack it, which is GREAT fun by the way; the first thing I vacced was two tomatoes and a cucumber – I’m sure you can imagine the arrangement. Very mature. Anyway, so I would smother the belly with fennel, chilli and garlic, roll it up like a porchetta, pack it and sous vide it for, ideally, 36 hours. Seems like a long time doesn’t it? It is. I wasn’t going to argue with Serious Eats however, which is where I found the appropriate cooking time and temperature; this is long enough for all the connective bits in this famously gnarly cut to break down into lovely gelatinous goo.

Complete with nipples…

My butcher’s knots need a little work…

So the sous videing was sorted but what to do about crackling? Long slow water bathing isn’t going to achieve that and we all know that crackling is the best bit; what good would the ultimate pork sandwich be without crispy pig fat? This is where the Serious Eats recipe really comes into its own, suggesting that the crackling is achieved by deep frying. Yes. Is deep frying a porchetta excessive? Yes. Is it very unhealthy? Yes. Does it achieve the perfect crunchy crackling we’re looking for? Definitely. So on the inside we have 36 hour (well, 30 actually; I didn’t fancy eating it at 4.30am) cooked ultra soft and succulent pork belly and on the outside the kind of satisfying crunch that can only ever be achieved by plunging meat into a wok full of hot oil and frying the shit out of it. Incredible.

Two versions of the sandwich were made. The first time I tried to be all posh about it, making a fresh mustard seeded slaw and a chilli flecked quince sauce to drizzle; the latter complements the hog in the same way as apple sauce but with a  more interesting fragrance. Piled on to a soft white loaf it was good, but it just wasn’t right. I’d deep fried the pork for goodness’ sake; there was something just too damn clean about the rest of the sandwich.

Round 2. Amendment number 1 = different bread; I’d wanted to keep things British but in the end caved to the superior sturdy chew of ciabatta. Amendment 2 = pimp my shop bought coleslaw, yo. Yeah, that’s right, a mayo laden coleslaw was mixed with shredded spring onions, wholegrain mustard and a little lemon juice until it was just, well, pretty tasty actually. The quince sauce had to stay but needed a filth injection which came in the form of hot sauce and plenty of it (No Joke to be precise – it has the fruity notes to fit with the quince), plus all the glorious golden jelly from the outside of the sous vided pork. Now we were talking. Almost. The pork was sliced and then…guilty eyes met eager ones…a suggestion was made…the next thing I know I’m deep frying individual slices of the pork belly. That’s right, a second deep frying; more surface area to get good and crisp.

Ultimate Hogwich was born.

Ultimate Hogwich (I got like a million sandwiches out of this plus some of the best instant noodle pimpage I’ve ever achieved; recipe to follow)

This is by no means a quick job; 30 hours is definitely the longest I’ve ever waited for something to cook, but it was worth it. The sous vide machine is immense fun and the results are incredible; I can’t stop thinking about what to try next. The recipe can of course be made by just cooking the pork belly without a sous vide machine. Radical.

1 boneless pork belly, about 3kg in weight
2 tablespoons fennel seeds
1 tablespoon hot chilli flakes
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
4 bay leaves
4 cloves garlic
Salt
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
String to tie the pork belly

Heat the sous vide machine to 68.5C (Serious Eats suggested 68.3 but my machine wouldn’t have that) and start prepping the pork. Lay it out flat, skin side down and score the flesh in a diamond pattern. In a dry pan, toast the fennel seeds and black peppercorns until fragrant, moving the pan about over a low heat so they don’t burn.

Grind the fennel seeds and peppercorns in a pestle and mortar, then sprinkle all over the pork belly flesh. Sprinkle the chilli flakes over the pork too, add the bay leaves and grate over the garlic using a microplane grater. Use your hands to work everything into the pork.

Roll the pork and use string to tie it tightly into a roll. Mix 1 tablespoon salt with the bicarbonate of soda and rub this all over the surface of the porchetta. You may then need to cut it into two pieces in order to vac pack it – I did.

So…vac pack it and once the sous vide machine has reached temperature, lower the pork in. Cook it for erm, 30 hours or even 36 if you are more organised than me. Once that’s done, remove the pork and plunge it into a sink full of iced water for 15 minutes, then remove from the bags, and save all the lovely gelatinous stuff round the edge. This is precious. Pat the pork dry, heat your oil for deep frying and really, really carefully, lower it into the oil. The pork should be halfway submerged, not totally. It will need about 5 minutes each side, during with time you should carefully spoon the oil over the exposed side. Just be bloody careful constantly, basically.

Then it just needs a final patting with kitchen paper before resting for 5 minutes and slicing.

For the quince sauce and coleslaw: melt a couple of tablespoons quince paste with some of the pork jelly and some hot sauce to taste. For the coleslaw, mix some shop bought coleslaw with lemon juice, spring onions and some wholegrain mustard. Pile the whole lot into a ciabatta and add a cheeky extra dash of hot sauce if you fancy it.

Brown stew chicken is a common Caribbean dish, yet I don’t see it too often on restaurant menus in Peckham. Well, not compared to jerk anyway. The stew takes its name from the colour of the sauce, which is made by caramelising the marinated chicken in brown sugar before adding the reserved marinade. This caramel flavour is essential to make a good brown stew and it’s important to spend time ensuring the chicken is properly sticky and golden before moving on. The sauce is then cooked down to an intense gravy; it’s sweet and damn spicy, depending of course on how liberal your hand is with the fierce yet fruity scotch bonnet pepper.

It’s a proper carnival of Caribbean flavours, with depth from the caramelised sugar and soy, plus fragrance from the thyme, ginger, spring onions and  lime. The smell carries like nothing else and will make your neighbours insane with jealousy. This is proper winter comfort food, Peckham style.

Brown Stew Chicken (serves 2-3, depending on how many chicken thighs you fancy)

1kg bone-in chicken thighs (about 6), skin removed
Juice of 1  lime
4 spring onions, finely shredded, plus one extra to garnish
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 scotch bonnet chilli, de-seeded and finely sliced
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 regular onion, finely chopped
1 red pepper, finely chopped
4 sprigs thyme
1 thumb sized piece ginger, peeled and grated
3 tablespoons light brown sugar
Half a tin chopped tomatoes (I used the cherry ones)
Water to just cover the chicken pieces

Place the chicken pieces in a dish and add all the ingredients except the sugar, chopped tomatoes and water. Mix well and leave to marinate for an hour or overnight if possible.

When you’re ready to cook the chicken, remove them from the marinade, reserving the marinade to add to the stew. Pat the chicken dry with kitchen paper. Heat a couple of tablespoons of oil in a high-sided pan and add the sugar. When it begins to turn dark brown and caramelised, add the chicken pieces, taking care because it will splatter a lot. Fry them until you have nice caramelised bits on both sides, then remove from the pan and set to one side.

Add the reserved marinade to the pot and fry for a few minutes to soften. Add the chicken pieces back plus the tinned tomatoes and just enough water to cover the meat. Season, then simmer for 20 minutes until the sauce is thickened and the chicken cooked through. Serve with rice and peas, or plain rice, garnished with the a little chopped spring onion.

I’ve been playing around with Hungarian goulash recipes and come up with a version using melty beef brisket, which I have to say turned out to be quite sexy. Point your cursor at this little linky for the recipe.

[EDIT: AoL is no longer online so please find the recipe below]

Beef Brisket Goulash (serves 4-6)

1 x 1kg beef brisket, in one piece
2 onions, sliced
1 red chilli, finely chopped
3 tablespoons un-smoked paprika
2 teaspoons caraway seeds
4 bell peppers (not green ones), sliced
1 tin chopped tomatoes
Beef stock (about 450-500ml)
4 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
A good splash of red wine
Sour cream
Chives
Zest of 1 lemon
Oil, for cooking

Bread, to serve

Heat 2 tablespoons of oil in a pan which is large enough to hold the brisket. When hot, sear the brisket until it is brown all over, then set aside on a plate. Add the onions to the pan along with the chopped fresh chilli and let cook over a low-medium heat until the onions are starting to colour – about 10 minutes.
Add the paprika and caraway seeds and cook, stirring constantly, for a couple of minutes. Add the red wine and let it bubble up and cook down for a few minutes more, then add the peppers and tomatoes.

Add the brisket back to the pan, along with the vinegar and just enough of the beef stock to almost cover the meat. Season with salt and pepper, then bring to the boil, put a lid on and simmer for 2-3 hours, or until the brisket is falling apart. Shred the meat into the sauce.

Serve in bowls with finely chopped chives, grated lemon zest and sour cream on top.

Food Stories has been predominantly recipe (not restaurant) focused this year. Creating is what makes me feel happiest inside, it turns out. So here are my favourite recipes of 2011, followed by the most memorable guilty pleasures; it would be terribly neglectful to exclude the latter, I think, as it’s surely clear by now that I’m quite partial to a filthy (probably pork-based, definitely artery-shuddering) snackette, or four.

1. Egg Yolk Ravioli (top photo)

It took three attempts, but I eventually nailed this recipe and was rewarded with some of the most decadent pasta I’ve ever eaten; a quivering yolk coddled by a ring of spinach and ricotta, ready to ooze headlong into a sauce that is made almost entirely from melted butter. Crushed pink peppercorns and purple basil made it one of my prettiest plates of 2011, too.

2. Piri Piri Chicken

2011 was the year I got even more into BBQ. Come drizzle, hail or sunshine, I was out there guarding that Weber, tongs in hand, bucket of meat on standby. We worked our way through jerk; brisket; brats cooked in beer; pulled pork and an obscene amount of wings (more on those later) but one of my favourite recipes was this piri piri chicken, inspired by a local takeaway. The combination of charred chicken (for piri piri must be charred), feisty chilli and tangy vinegar sauce made this one of my hits of the summer.

3. Boston Baked Beans

These rich and smoky Boston baked beans are thick with molasses and packed with nubs of smoked pork belly. They’re about as different to regular baked beans as you can imagine and they rocked my world.

4. Baghdad Eggs

I first came across Baghdad eggs in Jake Tilson’s brilliant cook book, ‘A Tale of 12 Kitchens’. This combination of  onions, sharp yoghurt and spiced butter on eggs is now my favourite weekend brunch.

5. Daim Bar Ice Cream

I visited Sweden this year and re-discovered Daim Bars. They went straight into ice cream. I watched my boyfriend devour the remains of this, straight from the tub with a spoon, after which he lay back, clutching his stomach, moaning “I feel siiiiiiick”. In a good way, you understand.

6. Ham Cooked in Coca Cola with a Rum and Molasses Glaze

The only way to make this sticky-sweet ham any better would be to pull great big hunks off it, stick it in a sandwich with some deep fried pickles and…oh, wait a minute.

7. Hickory Smoked Hot Wings 

After my first batch of home made hot wings, I wanted to do a variation and decided to smoke them using hickory wood chips, before dousing them as usual in Frank’s Hot Sauce and melted butter. Come to mama.

8. Smoky Aubergine and Lamb Pide

Pide are like a pointy Middle Eastern version of pizza. I based the recipe on my ‘Peckham Pizza’ (based on lahmacun). The topping is an intense paste made from spiced, minced lamb and the flesh from a charred aubergine. Garnished with chopped pickles and herbs, they’re lovely eaten as is, or wrapped around some salad.

 9. Pork Pibil Tacos

This pibil was made with pork knuckles and smothered in achiote paste – a wonderful ingredient which simply has no substitute. The tacos were spicy, drizzled as they were with a sauce made from orange juice, onion and scotch bonnet chillies.

10. Sausage Rolls with Apricots and Whisky-Caramelised Onions

And finally, a seasonal entry at number 10, my new favourite sausage roll recipe. Onions were slowly, slowly caramelised then bubbled furiously with whisky before going into these sausage rolls along with some dried apricots. The sweetness worked so well with the sausage meat and I’ve had great feedback from people who’ve made them this Christmas.

For the guilty pleasures, I’ve exercised some restraint (most uncharacteristic) and narrowed it down to five:

1. Baked Gnocchi with Gorgonzola and Spinach

Sneaking in on 3rd Jan was this rather naughty dish I made for my boyfriend’s birthday dinner. Home-made gnocchi baked in a sauce of Gorgonzola and cream, with a little spinach thrown in to ease the guilt. The gnocchi goes crispy on top while remaining gooey and soft underneath. A cardiologist’s nightmare.

2. Wedge Salad with Blue Cheese Dressing and Candied Bacon

Candied bacon is definitely one of my top guilty pleasures of the year, so much so I wrote a whole post about making it and using it. I have fond memories though of this ‘salad’ garnish, chopped candied bacon sprinkled over a river of blue cheese dressing and crunchy iceberg.

3. Deep Fried Pickles

Everyone went mad for these in 2011. I stuffed mine into a sandwich with coca cola ham and hot sauce. Then I had a lie down.

4. Meatwagon Burgers

I’ve followed Yianni’s journey from his van in Peckham, through #Meateasy in New Cross and now to Meat Liquor via The Rye. The latter has to be the most convenient and dangerous burger vending situation ever in existence if the state of my waistline is anything to go by. The Rye pub is opposite my house you see and for a few glorious months I needed to do little more than hop over the road to get my fix. Now they’re gone and Meat Liquor is in central London. I could cry.

5. Eggy Bread and Candied Bacon Sandwich

In at number 5: the sandwich of shame. I had candied bacon to hand and I’d just made eggy bread. It had to be done, see? We felt the guilt after eating this but damn, it was good. Sick, but good. If you’re into sandwiches, I’ve written a post about my top 5 here.

Phew. No wonder I need to lose weight. The diet inevitably starts er, tomorrow but until then I’ve got a Ginger Pig rib eye with my name on it. Happy New Year everyone. Thank you for reading and here’s to a tasty 2012. Cheers!