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Origin: Marcella Hazan

Serves 6

Origin: Moro cookbook

Served 4

Ingredients (for 2)

• 80g basil leaves, removed from the stalks and carefully washed and squeezed dry
• 1-3 garlic cloves, peeled
• 2-3 tbsp pine nuts
• 6 tbsp olive oil
• 40-80g pecorino or parmesan, or a mixture of the two (use sardo, a Sardinian ewe’s milk cheese for maximal authenticity), grated
• Salt and pepper

Blend the basil, garlic, pine nuts, olive oil, salt and pepper to a rough puree. Stir in the cheese. Add a few tbsp of the boiling pasta water just before draining and mixing them together to loosen it up a bit.

Origin: The recipe below is mine, but adapted from three recipes. One is from the recipe book of the Walnut Tree Inn, from back when it was an excellent and highly regarded Italian restaurant, another from the River Cafe cook book, and the last is from Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cooking. I highly recommend all three.

Origin: Moro cookbook

This is how I remember a recipe I cooked from the Moro cookbook. It's roughly right, and it worked fine cooked like this.

Ingredients

For two large portions 

Origin: Alastair Fletcher

Alastair likes to be... efficient in his communications, so here is his jambalaya recipe in full:

Chorizo, red onion, garlic, ginger, chilli, celery, various peppers, chicken, prawns, tomatoes, smoked paprika, port. Put it in a pot and cook. Order probably doesn't matter too much!

Origin: Michael Hutchinson (verbatim)

There are 4 stages to this recipe, it's a long job but only because you have to let things cook. You do not use salt as the meat is salty, see below.

Origin: various cookbooks

Like risotto, there are a million ways to make paella. This is just one, it's a good thing to play about with.

Ingredients

• Paella rice, about the same as for a risotto, maybe 75g per person?
• Onion, 1 per 3 or 4 people is probably, and one for the white fish if using
• Garlic
• Parsley, and optionally bay leaf and thyme (see below)
• White wine
• Chicken (thighs and legs are best), maybe one leg per 2 people
• Mussels, as many as you want
• Raw prawns with shell, as many as you want, I usually go for 3 king prawns per person
• White fish fillet, very much optional
• Squid, one small one per 2 people probably
• Red or green pepper, 1 per 2 people
• Tomatoes, 2 or 3 cherry tomatoes per person is probably enough, but more is also fine
• Saffron, 6 strands per person?
• Salt and pepper

Method

There are quite a few stages to this, and if you're organised you can do them overlapping one another but it can get a bit hectic.

Origin: Olga

Beat 2 eggs. Boil 1/2 pt milk with 2 tablespoons sugar. Pour on eggs and mix. Put mixture in cooking dish - place in moderate oven for about 15 minutes.

Origin: various recipes on the internet

As I understand it, the basic recipe is:

• Soften vegetables
• Add chicken stock, beans (dried; soaked overnight and rinsed) and ham
• Simmer for a few hours until the beans are tender
• Add seasonings
• Mash or blend

I fried some streaky bacon (4 rashers) in plenty of olive oil, then set this aside, added 4 onions and 3 sticks of celery chopped and softened them. I then added some chicken stock to cover (homemade, see an earlier entry on this blog, the soaked beans (500g), 150g of chopped ham, and simmered for about 2 hours. I then roasted a tablespoon of cumin seeds, pounded them in a pestle and mortar and added that, along with some salt and cayenne pepper, to the soup. Cooked for another 10 minutes. Finally, I partially pureed it using an electric hand blender. This left some whole beans as well as some roughly and finely pureed bits, a nice combination of textures.