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!

I’ve written a Peckham-influenced shakshuka recipe for my column on AoL Lifestyle. Shakshuka is a classic Middle Eastern dish of peppers, onions and poached eggs – it’s pretty intensely flavoured when it comes down to it, especially super-charged Peckham-style with scotch bonnet chilli and thyme. This is one of my favourite weekend brunches; head over to Lifestyle for the recipe.

I was privy to an e-mail recently that said all I ever talk about is pork. Well, Mr. Anti-Swine, stick this in your judgement pipe and smoke it.* Corn! A vegetable! Serious!

Defensive? Moi?

The golden cobs were 5 for a pound in Peckham last week, which is obviously an offer only a stupid woman would refuse. I decided to smoke them using hickory chips, considering I’d had such success with the hot wings (that’s chicken, right? Pigs don’t have wings, silly!) The Gods of Confidence were there to teach me a lesson however and the first time I was way too enthusiastic with the chips. It is definitely possible to over-smoke things, which seems really obvious now that I’ve done it.

My default topping for corn is usually butter mixed with chipotle and lime but I didn’t want to confuse things with smoky chipotle and smoky corn so I just gave them a thorough butter-bath followed by a scattering of my best (unsmoked) paprika, the zest of a lime and a good squeeze of its juice.

I can see myself using these in some sort of relish, or maybe serving them frittered with bacon. Oh no wait…

*Okay FINE, so it has been a little pork heavy around here lately. Ahem.

Hickory smoked corn

Butter
Paprika, cayenne or fresh chilli (whatever takes your fancy)
Lime juice and zest
Salt and pepper

Hickory wood chips for smoking (1 handful. Do not be tempted to add any more for 4 cobs).

Light your BBQ for indirect cooking (with the coals to one side). The corn doesn’t necessarily need indirect cooking but you’re using wood chips and (apparently) should never cook food directly over the smoke. Soak a handful of chips in cold water while the BBQ is lighting.

When it is hot, put your corns on the side that is without coals, throw your chips into the coals then put the lid on your BBQ. Cook until the corn cobs are tender and juicy – about 20 minutes. Adorn with butter, lime, chilli, salt and pepper.

I just love how the Americans cut a big wedge of iceberg, drench it in blue cheese dressing and then call it a salad. Respect.

I’m rather fond of the poor old iceberg. It doesn’t have any flavour to speak of but as a big ol’ wedge of crunch, no lettuce does it better. So, you take a quarter of the lettuce and drench it; yes, drench it, in a blue cheese and sour cream dressing. Dribble. You’ll need something to offset all that richness and tang though, so why not sprinkle on a handful of sweet ‘n salty pig-candy pieces? Oh yes indeedy. Picture this: kerrrunch down through that wedge; creamy, salty; nuggets of blue cheese sneaking into every layer but then, hang on what’s this? Chewy shards of sticky, streaky candied bacon, that’s what. Salad garnish crack.

Caramelised walnuts would make a lovely alternative to the bacon but I wasn’t allowed to make those because that would have taken up time I could have been using to make more candied bacon.

Wedge salad with blue cheese dressing and candied bacon (serves 4)

1 iceberg lettuce (try to get a nice round one so your wedges look good)
150g blue cheese (I used Roquefort)
200ml sour cream
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 tablespoon lemon juice (plus extra just in case; I found I wanted a little more)
1 teaspoon mustard (I used Dijon)
1 tablespoon chives, snipped with scissors

For the candied bacon

8 rashers streaky bacon
1-2 teaspoons of sugar per bacon rasher, depending on size

First candy the bacon by laying the rashers out on a baking tray and sprinkling the sugar evenly over them. Whack them under a hot grill until crisp and caramelised. Wipe the rashers around in the stick juices that have accumulated in the tray, turn them over and cook the other side. Watch them like a hawk once you’ve turned them as they will caramelise extremely fast. Once cooked, remove and let cool on a wire rack. Don’t let the pieces touch each other as they will stick together.

Crush the garlic with a teeny pinch of salt in a pestle and mortar until creamy. Blend the garlic with all the other dressing ingredients together in a bowl. You can do this with a blender if you like but I like my blue cheese dressing quite chunky so I mash it in a bowl to achieve the right consistency; it’s nice to get the odd nugget of cheese. Taste and add salt and pepper if you like; the cheese will already be quite salty. Taste again and add a little more lemon juice if you think it needs it.

Remove any manky outer leaves from your iceberg and quarter it. Wash it. Arrange each wedge on a plate, dollop on the blue cheese dressing. Cut the bacon into pieces and sprinkle over. Serve.

Visiting Pitt Cue Co. got me thinking about American BBQ and specifically, pulled pork. I don’t have a smoker at home but I do have a decent Weber, which is more than capable of housing a big ol’ hunk of pig shoulder for 4 hours. In she went and out she came, alarmingly black after the allotted cooking time. This is normal. The caramelised crust or ’bark’ is sealing in the moist, fat-bathed meat.

I gave the shoulder a good rubbing 24 hours before with a shed-load of sugar, smoky chipotle flakes, orange zest and garlic plus some ground cloves and allspice because neither ever do any wrong on the grill and they sling things off in another direction. I was pleasantly surprised by how much the rub penetrated the meat and also by how edible that crust turned out to be; crunchy umami-pork-bark.

As the meat was going to take so long on the BBQ, I made use of the oven for 4 hours too, cooking Boston baked beans. They are time consuming as the beans need soaking overnight but wow, the results are worth it.

It starts, as all the best things do, with pork. I bought a piece of smoked pork belly (readily available in Peckham but smoked bacon or pancetta would substitute well), chopped it into chunks (including the rind for extra flavour) and combined it with the beans, Worcestershire sauce, spices and molasses. The molasses is the defining feature of Boston baked beans, Boston being apparently famous for producing loads of the stuff, a fact which led to the ‘Great Molasses Disaster’ in 1919. A 2,300,000 gallon storage tank collapsed, flooding the city with a black slick, killing 21 people. Wikipedia tells us the residents claim you can still catch a whiff of molasses on a hot summers’ day.

Anyway, I can’t recommend these beans enough. They have a very ‘BBQ’  flavour from the pork fat and spices and the malty sweetness of unrefined sugars means it melds into one of the most rich and satisfying dishes I’ve ever eaten; up there with rendang and Marmite on the umami scale.

Ready to go in the oven.

At the end of cooking time, a slightly scary crust has formed on top of the beans.

Breaking through the crust to a chorus of ‘oohs’ and ‘aaahhhs’.

The leftovers on toast the next day. So porky. So smoky.

That white blob in the background is the pickled fennel I made to accompany the meal. Steeped in a mixture of pink peppercorns and citrus zests, it was very welcome alongside the richness of meat n beans. We wiped the plates clean with chunks of sourdough.

This was probably my favourite BBQ of the year so far, even though it rained. There’s no need to give up hope when this happens by the way, just get yourself a chair and an umbrella…

Pulled Pork (serves 2-4, depending on appetite; mine fed 4 but we had beans)

1 x bone-in pork shoulder weighing approximately 2kg
2 tablespoons chipotle flakes
Zest of 1 orange, finely chopped
200g dark brown sugar like muscovado
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
2 teaspoons ground allspice
1 tablespoon salt

Mix all the ingredients for the rub together well, using your hands. The night before you want to cook the meat, rub it all over, liberally with the rub. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

The next day, remove the meat from the fridge about an hour before you want to cook it. Light the BBQ and when the coals are white, bank them to one side of the grill. Place the meat on the other side so that it is not sitting directly over any coals.

Cook the meat for 4 hours. Each hour, add 8-12 more coals to the pile. This should keep the temperature fairly constant. The meat will be completely black on the outside after this time; don’t worry. Remove the meat to a plate and start pulling it apart to reveal the meat within. Use two forks to shred it. Serve.

Boston Baked Beans (serves 4 with leftovers)

500g dried white beans (I used cannelini but white kidney or haricot beans would also work)
450g piece smoked pork belly (or smoked bacon or pancetta; you want it in one piece so you can cut nice chunks), cut into chunks, including the rind.
2 tablespoons tomato puree
3 tablespoons brown sugar
3 tablespoons molasses
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 bay leaves
1 medium onion, diced
4 cloves
1 cinnamon stick
Salt and pepper

In a large bowl, cover the beans with plenty of cold water, leaving room for them to double in size. Leave to soak overnight. The next day, drain and rinse the beans.

Place them in a large pan or heavy casserole dish if you have one (so you won’t have to transfer the beans when you want to put them in the oven). Cover them with water. This needs to reach 2 inches above the top of the beans. Bring to the boil and boil hard for 10 minutes, skimming off the scum. Reduce to a gentle simmer and cook for 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 140C/275F/Gas 1

If using a saucepan, now transfer to an ovenproof casserole. Add all the other ingredients but NO salt at this point. Cover and cook for 3 hours. After this time, taste and season carefully with salt (the pork will be salty). Cook, uncovered for a further hour.

Pickled Fennel

4 bulbs fennel
500ml white wine vinegar
3 teaspoons salt
5 tablespoons sugar (or more to taste)
1 orange
1 lemon
1 scant teaspoon pink peppercorns
5 black peppercorns
1 teaspoon coriander seeds

Cut the fennel in half lengthways and remove the core. Slice horizontally into thin strips. Place in a colander, mix well with the salt and leave to drain for 1 hour.

Remove the zest from the lemon and orange and juice the fruits. After the fennel has finished draining, mix in the zests and pack the mix into a sterilised jar.

In a small pan combine the citrus juices, vinegar, sugar, coriander seeds and peppercorns. Heat the mixture almost to boiling point, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Pour this over the fennel, making sure that it is all covered. Seal and allow to cool.

I found myself at London Bridge the other day with some time to kill and so I wandered down to Borough Market. It was a Tuesday, so I knew the main market wouldn’t be open but the peripheral shops like Neil’s Yard Dairy, The Ginger Pig and Brindisa would. As soon as you step into Borough Market some sort of money hoover is switched on and your wallet starts haemorrhaging dosh; so it was that I found myself dropping £20 in Brindisa. I bought some cooking chorizo, Ortiz tinned tuna and dried choricero peppers (also used to make paprika). I pondered how to use the latter and decided I’d try them in a Romesco sauce, a Catalan sauce which is a potent blend of peppers, garlic, olive oil, almonds and breadcrumbs.

Romesco sauce tastes about a million times better made with proper Spanish peppers and I wish I’d had Spanish almonds too. The peppers added a smoky depth and bittersweet flavour, just like the sign in the shop told me it would. The pounded, toasted almonds add richness; I adore any sauce with nuts in, muhammara being another good example. We ate it with pan fried fillets of gurnard but any white fish would work well.

I’ll be making this on my annual trip to Catalonia with two of my mates later this year and eating it with vegetables (hopefully calçots), meat, fish, anything and everything that can be grilled on the BBQ under the beating Spanish sun.

Romesco Sauce (makes enough sauce to serve 6-8)

3 dried choricero peppers
100g almonds
1 thick slice stale crusty white bread (if you only have fresh, dry it out in a low oven)
3 large tomatoes
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
Juice of 1 lemon
6 tablespoons olive oil plus a little extra to finish

Begin by removing the stalks from the peppers (twist and pull), shaking out the seeds and covering them with boiling water. Let soak for half an hour. When re-hydrated, chop finely.

Meanwhile, toast the almonds in a dry pan, moving them around until they smell toasty and start to colour slightly. Remove and set aside. Whizz the bread in a blender to make breadcrumbs. Skin the tomatoes by make a cross shape in the bottom of each one then covering with boiling water for a few minutes. Drain, then plunge into cold water and leave for a minute. The skins should now peel off easily. Chop finely and set aside.

In a pestle and mortar, pound the almonds until they are all crushed. You can do this in a blender but you need to be careful you don’t end up with nut butter by over-processing the nuts.

Now you just need to mix everything together. You can either pound it in a pestle and mortar but I used a blender as this makes quite a lot of sauce. Don’t over-blend though, you want the sauce to keep a nice coarse texture. Taste, adjust the seasoning and serve. You may want to add more lemon juice or olive oil.

I pride myself on being able to make dinner out of what looks like nothing. I get into this zone where I think I’m in some kind of Ready Steady Cook-style competition and get all excited about how I can make a 3 course dinner out of an old bag of nuts and an egg. I didn’t make a 3 course dinner, I just made a tart, but still.

It’s good for using up any odds and ends of cheese, this tart. Chuck ‘em all in there. I used the fading remains of a block of cheddar plus 3 types of onion: red, white and spring. The pastry was shop-bought, knocking around in the freezer. It was rich, filling and mmmm cheesy. Not bad for a bit of fridge foraging.

Cheddar cheese and onion tart

150g cheddar cheese, crumbled
2 large red onions, sliced into thin half moons
2 medium white onions, sliced into thin half moons
4 spring onions, finely chopped (white and green parts)
1 clove garlic, crushed
1 sprig rosemary (or thyme), leaves removed and finely chopped
2 eggs
100ml double cream
250g shortcrust pastry
Salt and white (or black) pepper

This recipe fills a 24cm tart dish.

Begin by caramelising the onions. Heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable or groundnut oil in a heavy based frying pan and add the red and white onions. Once they are sizzling, turn the heat down as low as possible and let them cook gently for about an hour, stirring every so often, until very soft and caramelised.

Preheat the oven to 190C/fan 170C/gas 5. Roll out the pastry to fit the dish and carefully lay it in, covering the base and sides. You want the pastry to overhang the sides by a couple of centimetres, as it will shrink during cooking. Make sure to patch up any holes. Fill the pastry base with baking beans (or dried beans or rice) and cook for ten minutes before removing from the oven and setting aside.

Mix the cheese with the spring onions, rosemary, eggs, cream and caramelised onions when ready. Season with salt and white pepper. Pour the filling onto the tart base and spread evenly. Bake for 25-30 minutes until golden brown.

Serve warm or cold with a sharp green salad.