This recipe was inspired by a tapa in an Andalusian bar, in a village surrounded by thousands of avocado trees. The dressing is a version of a recipe I learned from Jim Fisher at Cook in France. There, we used grain mustard and served it on a salad of blanched spring vegetables and poached eggs. I toned it down a little here so as not to overwhelm the avocados. I like this colourful salad so much I’m already imagining variations: crumbled feta cheese on top, for example.

Serves four:
Dressing
3 medium untreated oranges
1-2 tbsp cider vinegar
a cheffy pinch of salt (about 1/2 a teaspoon)
1 tsp Dijon mustard (smooth or grainy, depending on taste)
about 8 tbsp of a neutral oil such as peanut oil
walnut oil (optional)

Salad
The orange segments from the oranges used for the dressing
2 avocados
4 roasted piquillo peppers from a jar
a few walnuts
a few salad leaves

To make the dressing, wash the oranges and use a zester to remove fine strips of zest from two of them. Do this while holding the orange inside a pan so that the essential oils from the skin splatter the pan, not the air.

Cut a thin slice from the top and bottom of each orange. Then use a sharp knife to remove the peel and pith all the way round. Hold each of the zested oranges over a bowl, and one segment at a time, slice between the membrane and the flesh on either side, letting stray juice drop into the bowl. Add the segments to the bowl as they are done, then tip into a sieve over the pan with the zest in it. Set the segments aside. Squeeze the juice of the remaining orange and add it to the pan via the sieve. If this all sounds too fiddly, just go to Cook in France and get Jim to show you how to do it.

Bring the juice to the boil and simmer till reduced by half and almost syrupy. Strain into a bowl and leave to cool.

When cool, add most of the vinegar and the salt and whisk to dissolve the salt. Whisk in the mustard. Then start trickling the peanut oil in drop by drop, whisking all the time. You’ll need about 4 times the amount of vinegar, i.e. 4-8 tbsp, but once the dressing starts to thicken to the consistency of thin cream, start to taste it and don’t let it get too bland. Add a little more vinegar and/or salt if you think it needs it. It should “zing” in your mouth, without being unpleasantly acid. Finally, whisk in a little walnut oil, just enough to give it a nutty flavour. Check the seasoning again and adjust if necessary. Remember it will be “diluted” by the salad.

Just before serving, wash and dry the salad leaves and shred them into strips. Cut the piquillo peppers into dice. Halve the avocados, remove the stones, and cut the flesh into dice, then carefully remove from the skins using a teaspoon.

For a tapa or starter, put a thin layer of leaves into four small white dishes, and top with a mixture of orange segments, peppers and avocado pieces. Drizzle generously with dressing and scatter with a few halved walnuts.

There’s an art to making a good tortilla, and I’m not sure I’ve cracked it yet (although I’ve cracked plenty of eggs trying). It’s the sort of thing where even the most detailed recipe is no substitute for being able to sense when you’ve got it right. Even if they aren’t up to the standards of the average Spanish tapas bar (can I do those rounded edges? Can I hell!), I have been pretty satisfied with my last couple of attempts.

The key points are a) the correct ratio of eggs to potatoes, and b) the right sized, heavy frying pan. I reckon you need about one medium potato per egg, but really you need to look at the mixture and know whether to add another egg. It should be neither too eggy (it won’t hold together) nor too packed with potato (too stodgy). The mixture should fill the pan to a depth of between 1 and 1 1/2 inches — thin tortillas are hopeless, and if it’s too thick it will scorch before it’s set in the middle.

Some people slice the potatoes, others cube them. I’m in the “slice them” camp at the moment, but I may change my mind. The onion is essential — it will be too bland without. The end result should be firm enough when cold to cut into wedges or squares and eat with your hands. At the same time it’s not nice if it’s so overcooked it’s gone leathery (another reason not to do a thin tortilla).

6 eggs
5-6 medium waxy potatoes
1 medium onion
olive oil
salt and pepper

Slice the potatoes thinly and finely chop the onion. Heat a generous amount of olive oil in a heavy frying pan of an appropriate size — the oil should cover the bottom to a depth of about 2-3 mm. Place over a medium-low heat and add the potatoes; cook gently for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, before stirring in the chopped onion (if you add it earlier, it may burn). The potatoes and onions must be completely cooked before you add the eggs, but they mustn’t brown. This process should take about 20 minutes; keep checking and stirring.

When the potatoes are cooked, season with salt and tip them into a sieve over a bowl, letting the oil drip through. Beat the eggs in a large bowl with some salt and pepper. Add the drained potatoes and onions; this is the point where you need to stir it and decide whether the ratio is right, adding another egg or a bit more potato if necessary.

Pour some but not all of the oil back into the pan; you only need a thin layer to stop the tortilla sticking. Over a medium heat, pour in the egg mixture and let it cook for about 10 minutes, till it’s lightly browned on the bottom and no longer runny on top.

At this point you have a choice. Are you brave? If so, take either a plate a little larger than the pan, or a flat pan lid (i.e. no lip) of similar dimension, and place it over the pan. With oven-gloved hands, flip the whole lot over so that the uncooked side of the tortilla ends up on the plate. Then slide it back into the pan. Cowardly? Preheat the grill and slide the pan under it to finish cooking the top. Either way, it should only take another 3-5 minutes.

When cooked, slide onto a plate and leave to cool. I genuinely do think it’s nicest left in the fridge overnight; the flavour always seems much better the next day. It will easily keep a few days in the fridge. Eat in squares as a tapa, or with salad and bread as a main course.

Scrape the carrots and cut into slices about 1 cm thick. Cover with cold water, add salt, bring to the boil, and cook for 10 minutes — they should still be a bit firm. Drain in a colander and leave to cool and dry out.

Meanwhile gently fry the chopped onion in some olive oil for about 10 minutes, till soft and starting to brown. Add the carrots and all the rest of the ingredients except the parsley/coriander and the yoghurt, and mix well. Season well with salt. Leave to cool, but don’t refrigerate — it’s better at room temperature.

Just before serving, sprinkle with parsley or coriander and drizzle a bit more olive oil over it. When serving on its own, you can add a dollop of yoghurt to each serving if you want.

I hadn’t originally planned to include Josceline in my celebration of 1980s-and-older cookbooks. But then I was reminded of her by Maggie. It made me realise that apart from one of my favourite old standbys, her fusion of blanquette and goulash, I hadn’t cooked any of her recipes for absolutely ages. Maggie says “Thirty years ago, way before Nigella, we had a ‘posh’ cook in the guise of Josceline Dimbleby. She is a great, innovative cook and I can’t understand why she isn’t more widely known and more highly regarded”.

Me neither! I first encountered her via a book picked up in a second hand shop for 50p, entitled Taste of Dreams. It was a good introduction, highlighting her creative, unusual approach, with dishes that are often titivated to within an inch of their lives presentation-wise (the water-lily timbale is a shocker, a flat cake of carrots and avocado wrapped in spinach and surrounded by chicory leaves like petals ). Maybe we can blame the 1980s for that. But she often shows real flair in combinations of ingredients and, especially, textures; Middle-Eastern influences are omnipresent since she spent part of her youth there.

Later, I occasionally picked up the little 50p cookbooks with my shopping in Sainsbury’s, and the most tattered and food-stained one I have is Josceline’s A Traveller’s Tastes. Nearly every recipe in this book is a winner, but for this vintage feast I decided to give myself maximum flexibility by using The Josceline Dimbleby Collection, a Sainsbury’s omnibus of recipes from several of those little books. And it turns out that my choice of author is apposite after all, because after a long break, during which all of her books have gone out of print, she has very recently published a new book: Orchards in the Oasis: Travels, Food and Memories.

I think the dishes I chose for this meal are fairly representative, if short on the Middle-Eastern element. Josceline does tend towards “posh dinner party” food, but there are some family-friendly recipes too. Browsing through the book, I realised that I’d never actually made my own chicken liver pâté, so that seemed a good choice as a starter, especially her “mild” version with orange juice, cream, and chopped almonds in it. I was somewhat peeved, then, to discover that the supermarket was clean out of chicken livers, but recovered by buying a tub of rabbit livers instead. This could only improve it; rabbit liver is gorgeous. My confidence was well-placed; it was delicious served with thin, crispy toast, and so easy to make that I will definitely do it again as an easy dinner-party starter; see recipe below.

I continued the bunny theme with a “rabbit in the orchard” pie; classic flavours of rabbit, cider, mustard and cream, with apples, mushrooms, and tarragon added. The recipe has a Josceline signature to it: no onions. I think she must have an onion-hater in the family, because a lot of her recipes lack them where you would expect to see them. It’s ages since I made one of these very English meat-and-sauce filled pies. Despite my care in decorating the pastry, it looked terrible when it was dished up; the runny beige sauce looked really unappetising. It did taste good though, and we liked the way the juices had soaked into the bottom of the thick pastry lid; yum!

Josceline is very fond of fancy desserts. I chose one featuring one of her favourite ingredients, dried apricots. Here, they are poached and then covered with a “caramel cloud” of vanilla cheesecake and a brûlée topping. I had a bit of a problem with the topping; she suggests sprinkling sugar over the top of the cheesecake, caramelising it under the grill, and then putting it in the fridge for several hours. Surefire recipe for soggy caramel. It seemed to me that sprinkling sugar on the uneven top and trying to burn it wasn’t going to work that well anyway. So I ended up making caramel in a pan and pouring it over the cheesecake once it had been chilled. This worked, although it was a bit thick in places. But it was another dish that looked a total mess when served. Definitely a candidate for small individual dishes. But the taste wasn’t exceptional, so I wouldn’t make it again. I find you do have to be selective with Josceline Dimbleby recipes; sometimes she’s too creative for her own good, and they certainly aren’t foolproof the way Delia Smith ones are. But when she gets it right (as in the paprika-flavoured blanquette), they work really well.

This is good served with mild fresh goat or sheep cheese. But I think it would go well with fish too. Or thinly sliced raw vegetables (fennel, baby artichokes…). Maybe even roasted garlic. Note that you need to start preparing it at least 8 hours before you want to eat it.

I had a photo, but I deleted it! Oh well.

For 2-4 people, depending on the size of your ramekins.

5-6 ripe tomatoes
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
3 tbsps olive oil
chopped fresh herbs (certainly basil, plus whatever else you fancy)
1/2 tsp coriander seeds, crushed
salt and pepper

Peel the tomatoes, then halve round the equator and remove the pips with a teaspoon. Cut into very small dice. Put them in a sieve and sprinkle generously with salt. Place the sieve over a bowl, and put a small plate or saucer on top of the tomatoes to weight them down, pressing it down well. Put the whole lot in the fridge for at least 6 hours.

Whisk together the remaining ingredients and stir into the tomatoes. Line small ramekins or glasses with clingfilm and distribute the tomato mixture between them, pressing down well to make a compact mass. Fold the clingfilm over the top and return to the fridge for an hour.

To serve, turn out onto plates and remove the clingfilm. Add cheese or other ingredients and decorate with a sprig of fresh basil.

After last month’s blandfest, it seemed apposite to turn to Elizabeth David’s Spices, Salts and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, published in 1970, for this month’s cookbook challenge. She points out that England has a long history in the spice trade, reflected in cooking from the Middle Ages onwards: “we took to spiced food with an enthusiasm which seems to have been almost equal to that shown by the Romans at the height of their preoccupation with the luxuries of living. A study of English recipes of the fifteenth century leaves one with the impression that to the cook the spices were a good deal more important than the food itself.”

First a word about the book. I am a huge fan of Elizabeth David, no matter how unfashionable she has become, and practically every modern British cookery writer owes a debt to her (often uncknowledged). Her French Provincial Cooking is required reading for any English speaker who wants to learn to cook classic French food. She doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and she happily assumes intelligence and competence on the part of her readers. But Spices, Salt and Aromatics… is not one of her best books. It’s bitty, parts of it cobbled together from a number of previously published articles, and not very coherent as a result. It’s hard to figure out, for example, what a recipe for paella is doing in a book ostensibly about English food! But that being said, this is Elizabeth David. Of course there are good things here, and masses of interesting snippets of information. The chapter on spices and condiments is inimitable David: a combination of the academic and the personal. Using old recipe books as sources, she dragged many worthwhile recipes from oblivion and played her part in making people realise that English food was not without its own merits. Like all her books, it’s one you can read for pleasure as well as cook from.

Oh, and the cover art is gorgeous! The back cover tells us:

De Heem’s painting shows a seventeenth-century version of a Lombard crustade or pie, a survival from the fourteenth century, when such pies were common to the tables of the rich in Italy, France, England, the Low Countries, and Germany. This one, as the artist made plain by placing a dish of prawns in the foreground of his composition, was a fish day pie. The medley of dried and fresh fruit, almonds and pine kernels, probably concealed the main filling of fish, perhaps salmon and eel, or haddock and codling, ground to a paste with apples and pears, and ginger, cinnamon, cloves and mace.

When the pie was baked the top crust was lifted, a mixture of cream and egg yolks, or for fish days a cream of almonds, was poured in. The cover was then replaced and, surmounted with its decorative cluster of pears, cored, filled with sugar and sweet spices, the pie was returned to the oven until the custard or cream had thickened.

Recipes for Lombard or “lumber” pies survived in English cookery books, virtually unchanged, until well into the eighteenth century.

Everything about these paragraphs, the precision, the careful use of phrasing and detail, the casual erudition, tells me they were written by Elizabeth David herself, not some Penguin editor.

So to the meal. Unlike last month’s it soared high on the effort versus results scale, requiring only about half an hour’s “hands-on” time. The starter, coriander mushrooms, was so simple it was hardly a recipe at all. Toss your quartered mushrooms in lemon juice, heat some olive oil and sizzle some crushed coriander seeds in it. Then add the mushrooms, a couple of bay leaves,salt and pepper, saute for a minute, then cover and simmer for 3 minutes. Turn out into a dish, season with more lemon juice and olive oil, done. You could eat this hot; I let it cool and served it as a room-temperature salad. Make sure you have some bread to soak up the juices. This dish didn’t seem old-fashioned at all; a triumph of simplicity and natural flavours (it would no doubt be better with more interesting, i.e. wild, mushrooms!).

The main course was equally timeless; a slow-roast joint of pork with sliced oranges and a glug of Noilly Prat. I’m sure Elizabeth David expected a traditional British pork roast, with fat; in France pork roasts are always sold boned, every scrap of skin and fat trimmed off, rolled, and neatly tied. So the breadcrumb crust didn’t really come off (not enough fat). But the seasonings (garlic, rosemary, herbes de Provence, finely chopped and pressed into the surface of the joint) worked well with the orange, and it was really tasty. As for effort, I put it in the oven, basted it after 30 minutes or so, then went out for an aperitif, returning an hour and a half later. We had cinnamon-flavoured apple sauce with it, but only because a glut of apples meant I’d just made a big panful.

For pudding, I made a cream cheese and honey pie. I cheated here and used ready-made pastry (well, I had been out drinking). It was very like Yorkshire curd tart; she specified “double cream cheese”, so I used mascarpone, flavoured with acacia honey, lemon zest and cinnamon. Method: whizz all filling ingredients together, pour into pastry case, put into oven, done. Very delicately flavoured and best eaten lukewarm or cold.

I was glad I’d picked this book up; I’d got out of the habit of my Elizabeth David books, and this meal reminded me how her strengths are in such simple, classic combinations. No follower of fashion, she knew what she liked. Again, “things taste of what they are”, but the subtle use of complementary seasonings makes all the difference. And it was so quick and easy to put together. I’ve only ever cooked a handful of recipes from this book, but I’ll certainly do some more.

A la forestière in French cuisine invariably means the dish contains mushrooms, because in autumn every self-respecting peasant is out there scouring the woods for fungi while hoping to avoid trigger-happy hunters. All we’ve scored so far are a few piboules from the poplar tree in our garden, but luckily dried ceps are always on hand to add a secret kick to savoury dishes.

This Jane Grigson recipe (from her Vegetable Book) worked wonders with the woody organic carrots in our veggie box. She serves them in hollowed-out bread rolls brushed with butter and crisped in the oven; I just served them on toasted muffins. They make a good vegetarian starter or light lunch/supper, but would also be an excellent accompanying vegetable for a roast, with or without the bread.

You could just use common-or-garden cultivated mushrooms, but fresh or dried ceps (porcini) will take it into another league.

750 g carrots, sliced fairly thickly
light, not too highly seasoned stock (beef, chicken, vegetable…)
1/2 tsp sugar
a knob of butter
nutmeg
250 g fresh mushrooms, preferably including some ceps, or dried mushrooms soaked in hot water, or a mixture of both
150 ml cream
chopped parsley and/or chives
juice of half a lemon
salt, pepper

Put the carrots in a pan and just cover with stock. Add sliced dried mushrooms if using (I added some of the soaking liquid too, because it’s full of flavour). Add sugar and nutmeg and simmer uncovered for 20 minutes or so, until the carrots are tender and the liquid is reduced to a syrupy consistency. If you are using fresh mushrooms, slice them and fry in a little butter till lightly browned, while the carrots are cooking. Add them to the cooked carrots, then add the cream and herbs and stir over low heat for a couple of minutes to thicken and amalgamate the sauce. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice to taste and serve immediately.

… aka mushrooms on toast.

Don’t let it be said that I’m a procrastinator! Here’s my first dish from Delicious Days, my cookbook challenge for this year. Supplies were low and dinner improvised, but I found some mushrooms in the fridge, so while the “real” dinner was cooking I opened a bottle of wine and made Nicky’s mushroom crostini: a 10-minute job.

We didn’t have any chives, which would have made them look prettier even with my poor photographic skills. We didn’t have any Marsala either, but we don’t do things by halves in this household, and Christmas comes but once a year — in went a glug of Warre’s excellent vintage port, bought at the airport last week. Well, it was only a couple of tablespoons. The completed sauce was poured over a few slices of my home-made 5-minute bread, and we enjoyed them with a glass of wine by a cosy log fire.

The mushrooms and sauce were delicious. Nicky says the bread should be fried, which I did, in olive oil, and then drained on kitchen paper, but some of it was a bit greasy. Next time I’ll toast or bake it.

Tatins seem to be everywhere these days; first Bellini Valli of More Than Burnt Toast, then Loulou, then Ivy came up with their own versions. I saw Ivy’s post just as I had got home with a big bag of apples to make one myself. At a stroke, I tried Ivy’s idea of making small individual ones, using some perfectly-sized shallow gratin dishes. A great idea for anyone nervous about flipping the tatin; it’s much easier with small ones! I think I’ll be making these a lot now, although there is something impressive about a single large tarte tatin fresh from the oven, glistening with caramel and just waiting to be shared with friends.

Finally, if you are really, really nervous about making tatins, try this unconventional method from Zen Can Cook — the results look stunning, and that’s exactly the colour you should be aiming for — though personally I would not use puff pastry.

Once upon a time, tarte tatin meant apples, but now it’s come to cover a much broader spectrum, from sweet to savoury. Some of them are a travesty of what tatin is about in my opinion; it should be simple, not tricked-up with loads of extra ingredients, and the essential point is that whatever you use should caramelise to a rich golden brown; if it doesn’t, what’s the point? Things that produce too much juice or go soggy/disintegrate will not work. Whatever you choose, you must be brave and caramelise it to within an inch of its life; it must be deep golden-brown before you put the pastry on, otherwise your finished tart will be pale and disappointing. So that said, here are a few ideas:

• To a classic apple tatin, add some thin slices of quince for a wonderful added aroma, or mix pears and apples. I always add some grated lemon zest and a squeeze of juice to mine.
• Try a pineapple tatin; it works really well, and is a good use for a fresh pineapple that isn’t as flavourful as you had hoped. Peaches and apricots are good summer candidates too.
• On the savoury front, tomato tatin is obvious and excellent; either one large one as a main course with salad, or small individual ones served as starters.
• Shallots make a fabulous tatin: caramelise whole peeled shallots slowly in butter or olive oil with a sprinkling of sugar, and add some balsamic vinegar at the end. For the ultimate taste and texture sensation, make individual ones, turn out, and top each with a slice of pan-fried foie gras. This is sinfully good!