How to Eat (80 page)

Spread a large surface with the flour and have 2 large plates ready. Using your hands, form the meat mixture into small balls, about the size of a walnut. Then turn each ball in the flour and place on the plates. I make about 46 meatballs with this amount.

Heat the tablespoon of oil in a nonstick frying pan (you will probably have to add more oil as you go) and brown the meatballs in it. I fit in about 11 a time and as each batch cooks put the meatballs into the pan with the sauce. When you’ve done them all, throw the remaining ½ can tomatoes into the pan in which you’ve been browning the meatballs and then put the contents on top of the meatballs and sauce. Cook in the sauce for 20–30 minutes. You can test the odd one to see whether they’re cooked through. Because my big, low cast-iron pot has a lid, I cook them covered, but it doesn’t really matter. Remove the bay leaves if you feel like it, and serve.

We always eat these with rice.

DUCK MEATBALLS

I make meatballs out of anything, usually halving or quartering the basic recipe above. When I make duck meatballs, I use duck breasts, and just one will do. Because they’re often sold in packs of two, I sometimes broil one for myself for supper and use what remains for the children. I strip the fat off and render it down to fry the onion and meatballs in. I chop the meat roughly and put it in the processor to grind, then mix it by hand with some very finely chopped orange zest, a good pinch of cinnamon, an egg, and a slice of bread, as above, but soaked here in yogurt made runny with milk (or buttermilk—either makes the fat-stripped meat more tender when it’s thus ground). I often use a canned tomato sauce mixed with some canned tomatoes to which I’ve added a good pinch of cinnamon (or I cook it with a short cinnamon stick, which I remove later), another good pinch of ground ginger, and, if I’ve got some in the cupboard, some gorgeous red-golden saffron.

HAM AND TURKEY

And after Christmas one year, I made some meatballs that were too moussey for adults but that the children (and their friends) were very keen on, out of leftover ham and turkey chopped in the processor and bound with some sausage meat—that’s to say, the meat from some good butcher’s sausages.

SPECIAL MEATBALLS

But my favorite meatballs are a Judeo-Italianified variant. I use 1 pound each veal and beef, 2 eggs, and 1 onion, as above, and add some marjoram to the parsley. I use slightly less bread—3 slices—and add about 2 ounces chicken livers, pulped in the processor. Continue as above. These are fabulous—light in texture, smokily delicate in flavor, and what I cook when I’ve got masses of children and their parents coming for lunch. The sauce is good if you throw in some marjoram with the onions and use Marsala, generously, in place of wine. And sometimes I process one of the cans of tomatoes with another 2 ounces of chicken livers. In my notebook, these go by the name of Special Meatballs, and rightly so.

CLOVE-HOT CHILI CON CARNE

In my experience, children like much stronger tastes than adults assume. When I make a chili con carne for them—well, I’m a child of the seventies, what do you expect?—I use spices—cloves in particular—to infuse it with heat rather than chili. I love it, too.

If you don’t want to soak and cook dried beans, by all means use canned ones and add them 15 minutes before the end. I often soak beans at night and cook them at breakfast-time, letting them cool in their cooking liquid for the rest of the morning.

And if you don’t want to use porcini, use button mushrooms, about 4 ounces sautéed in 2 tablespoons oil and added to the chili at the end of its cooking time, or no mushrooms at all. But what I do recommend, if not using the porcini, is that you track down some Italian-imported porcini-flavored bouillon cubes and add ½ cup stock made from them when you put in the tomatoes.

FOR THE BEANS

2/3 cup dried pinto beans, soaked overnight

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 celery stalk

3 dried porcini

1 medium onion stuck with 2 cloves

1 tablespoon olive oil

½ ounce dried porcini

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 medium carrots, peeled and minced

2 medium onions, minced

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 celery stalk, minced

1 dried red chili pepper

1 pound ground beef

½ teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon cloves

1 can (14.5 ounces) whole tomatoes, with their juice

2 tablespoons bottled barbecue sauce

2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

Drain the soaked beans and combine in a saucepan with the garlic, celery, porcini, onion, and oil. Add fresh water to cover generously and simmer over medium heat, covered, until well flavored, about 1 hour. Drain.

Meanwhile, for the rest, cover the porcini with hot water and set aside to soften. Heat the oil in a frying pan, add the vegetables and dried pepper, and cook for about 10 minutes or until soft. Remove the pepper (my daughter, when she was barely three, liked it hotter by having the chili pepper minced with the vegetables in the processor, but go cautiously). Add the meat and the spices, and turn and push about in the pan before pouring in the tomatoes and the barbecue sauce. Add the softened porcini. Strain and add their soaking water, pouring slowly so the gravelly, grainy bits don’t gush in too. Stir in the brown sugar and the drained beans and simmer for 1 hour or so.

DUCK LIVER SAUCE

I suppose it’s because it was dinned into me when I was a child, but I can’t help thinking it incontrovertibly a Good Thing when children eat liver. Duck livers are sweeter and moussier than chicken livers, and so more child-friendly. Sometimes, when I buy a couple of ducks to roast, I use the livers either with leftover meat (in the unlikely event there is any) or some specially bought breast, diced small, to make a chunkier, meatier pasta sauce than the one that follows. For this you’d need to buy duck livers especially, I should think.

I used muscat for this because I had some—dark and Australian—left over in the fridge, but Marsala would do fine—and, if you don’t like putting alcohol in children’s food, substitute apple juice.

Serve the sauce on penne or tagliatelle—or rice.

1 small onion, chopped roughly

1 medium carrot, peeled and chopped roughly

1 ounce pancetta or bacon, chopped coarsely

2 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped roughly

3 tablespoons oil for frying

10 ounces duck livers (about 4)

¼ cup muscat wine, Marsala, or apple juice

1 tablespoon hoisin sauce

2 tablespoons tomato purée

½ can (14.5 ounces) chopped tomatoes

Put the onion, carrot, pancetta, and garlic in a processor and blitz, or mince by hand. Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a deep frying pan and add the chopped mix. Cook on a medium to low heat until softened, about 10 minutes. Add the remaining oil and livers and cook, turning often, until browned but still pink inside. Add the muscat, the hoisin sauce, and the tomato purée. Cook for another minute or so and then put in a food processor and give a couple of turns so that it is chopped but not mushy. Put back in the pan, add the tomatoes, and, when warmed through, season with the salt and pepper.

PASTA SAUCE WITH SAUSAGE

As children seem to love sausages, you should try making a pasta sauce with them (see
page 434
for the recipe, which is for the shepherd’s pie filling, to be used as a sauce). The sausages you need for this are sweet Italian ones. I use 4 sausages (about 8 ounces) in place of the ground beef—in other words, substitute weight for weight. Remove the casings and prod and push about the pan much as you do the beef, only more emphatically, to break the meat up satisfactorily. A tablespoon or so of cream or milk toward the end binds the flavors and textures of the sauce smoothly and harmoniously together.

CHICKEN PATTIES

These pale and miniature burgers take little time, require little effort, and are always, at my house at least, rapturously received. To simplify matters even further, you could always substitute about 10 ounces ground turkey (relatively easy to come by these days) in place of the chicken thighs; in which case use hands rather than machinery to combine everything. If you want, you can make, cook, cool, and then freeze the patties, to be reheated quickly whenever you need a fail-safe child-friendly meal at short notice. If you’re nervous about any child’s reproachful sensitivity about green bits (although I’ve never had any complaints, even from vegetable-phobic children), then just leave out the parsley.

handful parsley leaves

3 tablespoons bread crumbs

4 boned and skinned chicken thighs, cut into rough chunks

2 best-quality pork sausages

whole nutmeg

2 tablespoons oil, for frying

Put the parsley into the food processor and give a good blitz. If your bread crumbs (see
page 22
for directions as to how to make them) are on the dry side, put them in with the parsley; if they’re soft, wait. Add the chicken thigh meat and process until very finely chopped. Squeeze the sausage meat out of the casings into the food processor, along with the bread crumbs, if not already added, and a good grating of fresh nutmeg. Process to combine and then, after dampening your hands, form into small rounds, about the size of a large walnut, and squish slightly to make small but bulging discs; you should get about 15 out of this amount.

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan. Fry the patties for a couple of minutes on either side just to brown them and then transfer them to a baking dish. Bake for about 30 minutes or until golden without, cooked through, with no pinkness within.

CHICKEN PIE

When I first made this chicken pie—with some leftover meat, light and dark, from chicken roasted earlier in the week—I was going to top it with mashed potatoes, but then it occurred to me that it would be less effort and take less time just to make a little disc of pastry. You can bake the pie immediately or, if like me, you find it more convenient, prepare and hold it to be baked later.

The process for making the sauce that coats the chicken is explored in detail on
page 19
. Just a reminder: make sure the bouillon cube’s a good one.

FOR THE PASTRY

½ cup Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

3 tablespoons unsalted butter or butter and vegetable shortening mixed, cold and diced

1 egg yolk, beaten with a teaspoon of water and a pinch of salt

1 tablespoon unsalted butter

½ chicken bouillon cube

1 tablespoon Italian 00 or all-purpose flour

1¼ cups milk, plus more, for wash

1 cup frozen peas or corn kernels or a mixture of both

1½ cups cooked cold chicken, shredded or chunked

salt and freshly milled black pepper

whole nutmeg (optional)

Using the ingredients listed, make the pastry as directed on
page 38
and put it in the fridge. Preheat the oven to 375°F.

For the chicken, melt the butter and ½ bouillon cube in a saucepan, prodding the bouillon cube to help it break up and dissolve. Stir in the flour and cook the manila-colored paste for a minute or so, stirring with your wooden spoon. Off the heat, gradually pour in the milk, stirring, if not actually beating, all the while. When all is smoothly incorporated, return to heat and cook for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook the peas and/or corn. When the sauce is cooked, add the vegetables and the chicken to it, season with the salt and pepper and a scant grating of nutmeg, if you like—and then turn into a buttered dish or dishes. I make this generally in one pie, in an oval stoneware dish with an 1-quart capacity.

If you’re not going to bake the pie right away, let the filling cool before covering it with pastry; in any case, roll out the pastry, dampen the edges of the dish, and fit on the pastry lid, cutting off excess and prinking round the edges as you like. Cut a few slashes to let steam escape. The pastry will sit somewhat on the filling. It makes the lid’s underside—but only the underside—just a big soggy. This, for me, is the best part.

Brush with the milk and bake for 25–45 minutes, depending on, among other things, whether the filling’s cold or not, or until the pastry is golden and the filling hot. You can always cover the pie loosely with a bit of foil if the pastry looks like it’s browning too soon.

A pie this size will feed 4–6 children, but my children and I can polish it off in one go. Last time, both of them had third helpings. I think it’s the savory saltiness of the white sauce that they especially love.

MARINATED CHICKEN DRUMSTICKS